Question

My iPhone app utilizes Wikipedia and I wanted to test to see how it works in different countries. I thought I could just use a proxy on my network to fake the country but Wikipedia still seems to redirect to English. If I use an address such as “wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog” it will redirect to “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog” instead. Google, while using a proxy, detected I was in Mexico.

Basically, my question is how can I test my apps compatibility with different languages in different countries if it accesses Wikipedia. Why am I not able to trick Wikipedia into thinking I’m in a different country. Am I doing something wrong, or does Wikipedia just not detect the country and always default to English (which doesn’t make any sense)?

Answer 1

It most probably uses the Accept-Language: xxxx header. If your browser (like mine) sends put a header saying Accept-Language: en-us, then Wikipedia does just that — it sends you the English version. Which is what all multinational sites should do (but don’t because they prefer to offset server loads regionally…).

So to test Wikipedia in other languages, you could just replace en. with something else, like es., ja. etc. However “ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog” does not have a page (of course), and “es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog” does exist but won’t give you what you’d expect…