Dreamwidth Suggestions

Description:
Entries composed of written or spoken material (text, images of writing, audio, video) usually have one or more languages in which the material is presented. Allowing entries to be voluntarily tagged by their owners to describe the language(s) they are using might allow some interesting features to be developed based on entry tagging.

If a particular spelling appears in more than one language, specifying the language of the entry in site search could help find the thing someone's looking for.

Statistics on actual use of the site by users who speak different languages might be helpful to staff, especially if the technical barriers to offering the site in translation are overcome.

It could help users better connect with people who speak their same language, especially users whose preferred language is in a minority on the site.


What would the user interface be like? A whole long list of possible languages could a) be unwieldy, b) might also leave out languages used by actual site users (sign languages and constructed languages spring to mind as languages that might be left out of even a fairly exhaustive list of languages, and entries with embedded video might have sign language, and fannish communities are reasonably likely to include Tengwar and Klingon, and goodness knows there are probably more use cases that I know nothing of).

One way to do it might be like the tags interface, where something can be typed in, and attempt to autofill from a preset list, but accept new entries gracefully. If designed properly, unique data entered here on public entries could be logged, collated, and presented to an administrator on a regular basis for review; items that are found to be actual common languages not present on the list could then be entered.

Any site function that involves searching by language should allow for synonyms -- three different people might use "tlhIngan Hol", "pIqaD", and "Klingon" to mean the same language -- to say nothing of the typos. There should be a way to bundle known synonyms and known typos -- and also a way to override this bundling.

Another challenge is that people might not tag all their entries (to say nothing of back entries). How hard/expensive would it be to autodetect languages? Failing autodetection, could a default be set by user, like the last language they used?

Description:
http://www.dreamwidth.org/multisearch is singularly unhelpful when it doesn't find what you were looking for. Currently, an unsuccessful search tells you: "No Match: Sorry: There were no results for the criteria you specified." So you have to remember that you were searching for, say, a particular email address as someone's email address. This is marginally all right when you've just entered it and you typed it correctly and picked the right sort of search, and you remember what you typed, and the page loads promptly. But if you pick the wrong category, typo the whatever, the page is slow, your computer is slow, your brain is not tracking properly, you go on to a new tab and come back later, it's a completely confusing result.