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

[Toby Bartels]

[Note:  The post that I'm replying to didn't appear on <intlwiki-l>.
        Or perhapse it was posted separately; I'm not sure.]

Gareth Owen wrote:

>Anthere wrote:

>>Okay. Most of the time a portal is defined as a site which is a convergence
>>of various entities. A Web site being useful like starting point, a door
>>open to a world of information.

>But usually, in my experience, web portals are a link to external content.
>This is explicitly listed among the many things that wikipedia is not.
>Wikipedia's definition of "Web portal" is different again.

Fine, so your experience with portals differs from Anthere's.
The fact remains that what Anthere is proposing is
a link to several *related* entities: the individual Wikipedias.

>>(by providing little services, such as emails accounts, news, weather...).

>As I understand if, this is orthogonal to wikipedia's aims.

Wikipedia does sort of provide news, in the form of background stories,
hence Anthere's proposal to place current events links on the portal.
(There has also been past discussion of providing email accounts.)

>>http://www.agriculture.com/worldwide/index.html
>>- Just provides a dozen of digested hit news from Reuters.
>>- links to different partners sites (all ag sites from all over the world)
>>- and somewhere hidden behind, some more stuff to try to keep people up a
>>  little bit longuer 

>i.e. Almost no original content.  Again, orthogonal to wikipedia's aims.

I don't see how it's a betrayal of Wikipedia's aims
to have <www.wikipedia.com> provide no original content
if it provides links to all of the <**.wikipedia.com>s that do.

>>* quick information (characteristics of the project, number of "partners",
>>when each started, maybe the number of articles we are currently having in
>>the base...)

>This bears no resemblance to any of the definitions/examples given above.
>What that is, is a front page.

This is information about the pages that it links to,
which fits in with what Anthere said above.

But who cares if Anthere's proposal is for a bona fide portal or not?
Let's consider the proposal itself.


-- Toby