Can we remove the "in English" link from the editions list on a work page?

[RayBB]

Having the link that just goes to this page (https://openlibrary.org/languages/eng) and is not useful to patrons as far as I can tell.

• https://openlibrary.org/languages/eng
• https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16092157W/Hello_Android_introducing_Google%E2%80%99s_mobile_development_platform?edition=helloandroidintr00burn

Describe the problem that you'd like solved

Proposal & Constraints

I think we should convert it to plain text instead of a hyperlink.

Additional context

Stakeholders

[stopregionblocking]

Doesn't this display for every language, not just english? Maybe there's a different function it could be changed to that would be beneficial across languages.

[RayBB]

@stopregionblocking it does show for every language. What function do you propose changing it to?

[mekarpeles]

I think we just want to remove the link around the language -- not the language text itself. This change seems fine (+1 @mekarpeles , @jimchamp , @scottbarnes )

[jainish2222]

Hello! Could I please work on this issue?

[RayBB]

@jainish2222 yes you're assigned. Good luck!

[hornc]

I don't see that this is a valuable feature. This is special casing English to be the only language that doesn't get a link.
Searching for books by language doesn't have a great user flow - as far as I can tell the advanced search page doesn't support languages. Language faceting on the other hand seems a lot better, but that supports a slightly different use case.

Improving searching by language, or making the language pages more useful for specific tasks would be better features.

This will add complexity in a way that doesn't seem generlizable If the website is being viewed in German is it still only English that doesn't have a link?

I vote to close this as "not planned"

[cdrini]

Oh to clarify I think the proposal is to remove e.g. the "in English" link. So all the "in {language}" links on the editions table, not specifically the English ones!

[hornc]

Remove the links to all language pages, but keep the text there? I don't see what that adds either. I guess that's why this is confusing.

For the recent work I've been doing on language codes the main way to get to view what languages OL has is by clicking on one of those links and then going back a level to https://openlibrary.org/languages

Language is one of the formal OL types https://openlibrary.org/type/language , removing the link will hide the specific catalog code used e.g. fre for French, which might be useful information for a patron to know. When other type objects are used on the UI, they are linked. Removing the link here would be inconsistent.

[cdrini]

The reasoning is I believe that clicking on e.g. "English" leads you to the somewhat empty https://openlibrary.org/languages/eng page. It's kind of a strange way to discover the /languages page as well. I wonder if we should add "Languages" to the Browse dropdown... A lot of people use Open Library to find books in a specific language! Note we do currently also link to /languages from /subjects

Note the current edition e.g. "English" link will still link to /languages/eng (here:

)

But we also don't link to the e.g. publisher page from the editions table (which is arguably a more useful page).

I think the ideal UX for me would probably be:

1. Clicking eg "in English" should filter the editions table for other editions in English.
   • Likely blocked by Should we change book page language selector? #8751
2. There should be a "Browse > By Language" option that goes to /languages
   • Likely blocked on a few pieces:
     • The /languages page should be cached, it's rather slow
     • Browse is getting a little long... maybe we can drop "Advanced Search" from here (depending on what analytics says) since we also link to it in the search dropper/search page.
     • We need to fix the bug with large search result set (eg languages:eng) causing solr to timeout.

I think until that larger plan, removing the links seems ok to me, and makes the editions table a little simpler (and also opens the path forward for us to change the behaviour of the link a little more cleanly to filtering the table). But would love to hear others' thoughts as well!