Regarding the comments about the importance of language links in the sidebar: if you look here you can see that the language links will be moved to a button/menu in the article header — https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...
The conclusions of the user testing show that people have a much easier time finding them in the new location.
Their test group for this feature consists of 8 to 9 people, with 5 in a control group. You'd think that for one of the most visited sites in the world, they'd have larger test groups?
I just hope you can still simply hover your mouse over the languages links to see the translation without having to click and go to the foreign language article.
