On Wednesday 16 October 2002 08:56 pm Stephen wrote: Ah, I see; One unified project with the most visible and widely known url going only to one language and one language alone. Perhaps the choice of words "portal page" was a very poor one on my part. Here is what I meant by it: A user types in www.wikipedia.org. They are greeted with a welcome page in English that has a very brief intro to the whole project and the non-profit. It mentions the total number of articles in all languages and also mentions the total number of language that have articles (we might want to set a small threshhold for inclusion in this count). Above this is a string or hyperlinks in a row. Each one is the word "welcome" in several different languages. A non-English speaker could click on his or her language's welcome page and be greeted the the text I described above translated into their language (this might also change the language.php file for that user's browser session to display that language's localized interface). Each welcome page would also have below this; A search field with a clean, simple interface along with a link to "advanced options". This search bar could be set to search all languages at once by default. A simple table with the words "Welcome to Wikipedia" in every language we have an active community for along with direct links to the main pages for those language communities (maybe by leading-in with a quick note saying "We are working on X articles in language Z at...."). A listing of the non-active languages with maybe a note asking viewers to contribute to an "orphan" (or whatever we call them) language. And above all this would be Recent Changes right where you would expect it to be (or Seneste ændringer, Lastaj Ŝanĝoj or Cambinos Recientes etc.; depending on which Welcome page you last visited). But this Recent Changes would by default list the last 100 edits made by the whole project (just the encyclopedia part, not Metapedia). There would also be links to each of the individual recent changes. Of course we can't do this now since each language is on a separate wiki with its own own separate database. But adding a language meta-tag to each article would make it possible to have truly unified project by only having one database and only one wiki. The fact that everything is in one database will not be visible to users. Only the multi-language benefits would be noticeable. NOTE: This would still allow a language community the option to "jump-ship" if they wanted too (preserving their leverage). All that would be needed is for somebody to select all articles based on their language's language meta-tag via a My SQL query and dump this into an archive (or so I gather). There would probably a script to do this for each language on a regular basis anyway for backup purposes. Also, defaults for individual language spaces would display everthing only in that language. Users would have to set their preferences to have a combined recent changes or to override default language interfaces, etc once they are in a particular language space (that is, in either the English, German, Spanish, French .... Wikipedias). For more read a discusion Giskart and I had about this on the bottom of: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org Another good page on this: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration Anything else would be just extra. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)