The language button is right at the top of the page. If anything its more accessible on mobile?
The button is labeled 文A, which is quite common for translation service, and is just under an article title so it’s literally the most visible UI element. It’s difficult to make it more accessible than that...
This to me is a testament to the fact that most buttons should actually be text unless extremely common like the hamburger menu, but even that's debatable.
I agree, especially on mobile (even in 2020, many users — who often just got used to the hamburger menu — don't realize that the vertical ellipsis is a symbol for "menu" or "more options", it often just looks like a random decoration to them), although on a desktop website or app you (hopefully) have the option of hovering the mouse pointer (even accidentally) over any unfamiliar bit of UI gubbins to get a clue.
I'll note though that the specific example of "文A" is, in fact, a text label. The first Chinese glyph even translates as "text".
Only in the sense that those glyphs are used in certain writing systems. It's not text in the more important sense of expressing a linguistic message. It's just random characters. "文A" is a text label to exactly the same degree that ":-)" is a text label.
Note in particular that the Chinese glyph does not translate as "language". That would be 语/語. As you accurately note, it translates as "writing".
It's standing alone here. I'm aware of words like 文明 and 中文, but here are the 14 glosses for 文 in the 现代汉语规范词典:
1. (verb) to tattoo or paint patterns or words onto a body
2. (noun, literary) a pattern, particularly as of wood grain
3. (noun) ancient rites/ceremonies
4. (noun) non-military affairs (opposite of 武)
5. (adjective) gentle; not fierce
6. (noun) indicating phenomena of nature or of human society
7. (noun) writing
8. (noun) an essay
9. (noun) the humanities and social sciences
10. (noun) an official document
11. (noun) Classical Chinese (the language that is to China as Latin is to southern Europe)
12. (measure word) used for the copper coins of traditional China
13. (verb) to cover; hide
14. A surname
Most of these senses come from words that include the morpheme 文, not from uses it permits alone, but "language" is still not even listed.
A flag icon or simply some more explicit text would be vastly easier to understand for me, especially if it actually looked like an interactive element.
How would you solve this given the limited space? A label saying languages is the mosy obvious but real estate is a little limited.
I'd hope that if the icon was prominent in desktop with a label that would reinforce its discoverability.
Try looking at a wikipedia page on your phone. You could replace the 文A button with one that said "antidisestablishmentarianism" and there would still be plenty of space. It's floating at the left of an empty row.
I agree that the UX could be improved and there is plenty of evidence to support that. On the other hand the edit icon is super discoverable and used without the label so I think the challenge with the language icon is 1) there are not many multilingual sites and 2) the other icons there potentially cause the user to ignore them entirely.
Throw in the 200+ languages and longer labels in some of them and it becomes even more complicated...
Multilingual sites aren't rare at all. There is a conventional way to display a language selector: it's a button (usually a dropdown menu, if you click on it) with a national flag and the name of the language.
The big problem on mobile wikipedia is that wikipedia already has a well-established way to select the language you want to see the article in, and the mobile site completely removes it.
As I've said before the mobile site doesn't remove it. It just changes the mechanism for understandable reasons based on the medium.
Nice to chat to you.