[Wikipedia-l] en.wikipedia.org vs www.wikipedia.org and the Wikipedia family

[Jimmy Wales]

Khendon wrote:
> What was wrong with my proposal to have the links divert to the language
> specified by cookie and/or browser setting? That still seems the best
> approach to me, although it might be a little more work...

If someone clicks on a link to 

<a href=http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson>Wikipedia: Thomas Jefferson</a>

then that's what we should give them: the English language wikipedia
article on Jefferson.  That's what they requested, that's what they
should get.

We should not forward them to fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson,
even if they have a cookie set to prefer French, nor even if they have
a browser setting to prefer French.

One of the reasons is that for many articles, the French article will
have a different spelling in the name of the article.  Efforts to
interlink the articles will be incomplete for a very long time, and in
many cases, efforts to interlink may be impossible due to different
choices of where to "split" certain topics.

We should follow the "Principle of Least Astonishment".  Users should
never be astonished, even if we think they'll be astonished in a good
way.

--Jimbo