Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Archive/Better fallback handling in Kartotherian's language selection

Random proposal ►◄ Archive The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Better fallback handling in Kartotherian's language selection

N We won't be working on the existing maps stack this year

Problem: Locations should be shown in the user's language. This is working but only if a location name is given in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) database just in the user's language.
Who would benefit: All Wikis which are using Kartographer and Kartotherian.
Proposed solution: In multiple steps, we should look for suitable labels in OSM database.

Search for a label in the user's language.
Search for labels in the same writing system like the user's language. For instance, French language uses the same system like English or German, Bulgarian the same like Russian or Ukrainian, Farsi the same like Arabic.
In case of multiple results we select the language of the biggest weight.
Additional fallbacks could be English or French labels because many readers can read and speak these languages.
Last fallback is the official language -- like now.

RolandUnger, thank you for submitting this proposal! We have reviewed this as a team, and we will unfortunately be unable to take on this wish. Here's why: Our infrastructure team is currently discussing options to switch out the maps frontend and backend to a different technology stack, which would be more robust and easier to maintain. If we can make that work, then it could take care of many of the concerns expressed in this proposal. It will be at least several months until we'll know for sure what the decision will be, so for this year's wishlist, we're not going to take on any possible commitments to working on the existing maps stack. Thank you again! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]