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Community Wishlist/Wishes/If a video is available in another language(s), show a hint in the video player

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If a video is available in another language(s), show a hint in the video player Open

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Description

There could be good reasons for videos to not have multiple audio channels in the foreseeable future:

  • If the audio channels are part of the video that could bloat the video to a very large size
  • Separating the audio from the video so there're two synchronized streams (video and audio) may not be readily possible for Commons

I don't know how streaming services, where one can switch between the audio languages, solve this. Regardless of whether or not audio and video are somehow separated or videos get multiple channels, the user doesn't know whether a given video is also available in another language:

  1. When a user is for example browsing Commons and understands quite a bit of English but would prefer another language, one can't see whether the video is also available in that language when not going to the file page where other language versions are usually (not always by the way) linked in the other_versions field of the file's description (the Information template). The user may have clicked on the video to play it directly from the frontpage, a Wikidata infobox, the search results or a category page without first going to the file page with the description.
  2. When a user is playing a video in Wikipedia where the video has either not been replaced or the language of the Wikipedia is not the language the user best understands – English Wikipedia is much larger than the others so many users with mediocre listening comprehension of English are also browsing it – then s/he may be interested in if the video is also available in a language s/he understands better.

There already is a hint whether subtitles are available (actually they are annoyingly turned on by default if there are any without a way to change that) – but there's no way to know whether another audio language version of the video is available.

Please add some sort of indicator and maybe highlight it more or prompt the user if it detects that a version is available that is of the language the user prefers. Similar to the subtitles, one would see a list of languages the video is also available in and can then switch to the version one would like to watch if there is one with just a click. This works best if some preferred language is configured (for example via ?uselang=de in the Commons page URL or the language inferred from the IP region or the preferences if the user is logged in).

This is very related to these two wishes:

When playing this video there is no indication that this video is also available in English
Example redubbed video, machine translated from German to English and many other languages

Assigned focus area

Unassigned.

Type of wish

Feature request

Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata

Affected users

Wikipedia users, Commons users

Other details

  • Created: 19:17, 19 March 2025 (UTC)
  • Last updated: 12:54, 27 March 2025 (UTC)
  • Author: Prototyperspective (talk)