[Wikipedia-l] Maybe "portal page" was a poor choice of words

[Daniel Mayer]

On Wednesday 16 October 2002 08:56 pm Stephen wrote:
> Indeed. Cunc has convinced me that a portal page is a
> bad idea. I think we should be working toward a
> unified project composed of different languages,
> rather than remaining the English Wikipedia, the
> German Wikipedia, the Spanish Wikipedia, etc.
>
> Stephen G.

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)