How to correctly set language preferences?

[Alfa1]

How does a user set which language they want to see first?
For example: an English user will not be interested to see French pages. Therefore they should always see the English page with the option to click on the French Flag to see that translation.
There doesn't seem to be a setting for this. How do I make this work?

[pegasus]

The translations are not actually the same page. They have unique URLs and are linked separately from each other.

If the user wishes to read your wiki in French, ideally they would navigate to your french translation of the index page. You would have written your french pages with links to french pages. If you wrote your french page with a link to an english page, that link will take you to an english page.

In this way, there would not really be a need for user preferences regarding language, except in the following cases:
- to direct the wiki tab to the index translation matching the user's language preference.
- a default language filter for area list contents. A user might want a default language filter set for areas that contain multiple languages, so that they only see french pages and not a mix.
- a language filter for search results, including sidebar search

To my recollection, these would all be new requests. You could probably tell me if they should be separate preferences or all handled by a single language preference.

[Alfa1]

A single language preference setting would be best. Let the user set his preference language. Then the index of his preference will be his index.