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Change the default Wikipedia language when searching

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Whenever I search for some word and click the "Wikipedia" icon, it goes to the Portuguese version of Wikipedia, which is the official language where I live. I want to force it to go to the English version of the article, because it's usually much better and more complete. At the moment, I have to open the Portuguese version, scroll to the bottom of the Wikipedia page and click "Read in another language" and then change to English. I have to do this every time I search for something on Wikipedia. Is there any way to do that?

Whenever I search for some word and click the "Wikipedia" icon, it goes to the Portuguese version of Wikipedia, which is the official language where I live. I want to force it to go to the English version of the article, because it's usually much better and more complete. At the moment, I have to open the Portuguese version, scroll to the bottom of the Wikipedia page and click "Read in another language" and then change to English. I have to do this every time I search for something on Wikipedia. Is there any way to do that?

All Replies (4)

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I'm afraid this isn't something you can currently change without switching your device to English. We choose which search plugins to show based on your device locale.

I just tested, and Wikipedia doesn't have a language-agnostic search endpoint — we can't just send a search to Wikipedia without specifying a locale (if we don't, it defaults to English, regardless of which language you picked).

We'll support more search engine management next year. In the mean time, perhaps visit the Wikipedia search page in English and bookmark it?

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rnewman@mozilla.com said

I'm afraid this isn't something you can currently change without switching your device to English. We choose which search plugins to show based on your device locale. I just tested, and Wikipedia doesn't have a language-agnostic search endpoint — we can't just send a search to Wikipedia without specifying a locale (if we don't, it defaults to English, regardless of which language you picked). We'll support more search engine management next year. In the mean time, perhaps visit the Wikipedia search page in English and bookmark it?

Thanks for the reply!

At the moment, that's what I'm doing, bookmarkin en.wikipedia.org and doing my search in there.

I know that this current approach - to use the system language as a parameter for everything language-related within the app - probably suits the majority of the users, but an option to change that manually would be great. It's not because one's system is in one language that everything he do/read/search is also in that same language. Google also does that with it's search engine, but luckily I can customize the search bar in Firefox Desktop to force the english language.

Looking forward to the updated search engine management!

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rnewman@mozilla.com said

I'm afraid this isn't something you can currently change without switching your device to English.

This is mindblowing

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You can submit feedback for prioritizing iOS features here:

https://fxos-ios-browser.ideas.aha.io/ideas/new