I agree it totally could be improved. Perhaps they're being careful? Elsewhere in the comments, someone showed that logged in users have more items in that bar (https://imgur.com/llv2rtc). That might not work so well in portrait.
I have 5 items in that bar on my Samsung Galaxy and I have no space for a label. As the screenshot shows the labels are there, just not visible until a certain breakpoint
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...
> 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.
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.
Using a national flag is a really bad UX pattern given the political ramifications and potentially offensive. Languages are not owned by countries. I am not aware of a multilingual site that provides over 200 languages in such a way that its country neutral (switching to a Spain based shopping site is not the same as switching to Spanish)?
As I've said before the mobile site doesn't remove it. It just changes the mechanism for understandable reasons based on the medium.
