On 10/24/02 8:49 PM, "Karen AKA Kajikit" <kaji(a)labyrinth.net.au> wrote: Just because it's balkanized technologically doesn't make it a good idea for it to be balkanized explicitly as well. I *do* think that the technological balkanization is a primary factor in having people consider there to be separate Wikipedias. If we agree that it's an important priority to interlink the backend, then I think it would make sense on making front-end changes that relate to such issues until after the new backend is in place. By the way, with Ram-Man's automatic article addition, we've just hit 80.000 English entries.

|From: tarquin <tarquin(a)planetunreal.com> |Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 11:40:38 +0100 | | > 1. A page like this is useful exactly once for any user. After that |it becomes useless. | |The Main Page is just the same -- I haven't bookmarked it & I only ever |visit it if I see it has been edited. I expect most regular visitors are |like me & bookmark Recent Changes. | No no, it is only us addicts who do that! Recent Changes is not for normal people. Normal people come first via Google and then use the Main Page, if for no other reason, to access the search facility. Any non-informative page, however congenial and well-intentioned, cuts down on readership. The Main Page is informative. Better that we pick up the default language from the browser and take the reader to the Main Page in their language then we take them to a pretty page all filled with all our languages. That may seem to make the 'pedia look good, but it actually stops people, if not driving them away. Tom Parmenter Ortolan88