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

[Neil Harris]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>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;
>  
>
I disagree strongly, but only about this detail: the "front page" of any 
website should lead directly to content: that is to say, an encyclopedia 
page. There should be an as-short-as-possible welcome banner at the top, 
perhaps with a pull-down menu of languages, that will change the 
language of the "front page", banner and all, to be any of the desired 
languages.
There should also be a link to a "portal page", as described in Mav's 
proposal, easily visible in the banner.

Then the front page for that given language leads directly into the 
content of the particular language wikipedia.

The language of the banner, and hence the rest of the page should be:

* the language specified in the URL, whether in the format 
en.wikipedia.org or www.wikipedia.org/en
* the language in the user's login cookie, if set
* the language specified by the user's browser preferences
* default to English if www.wikipedia.org/com is used, and the language 
cannot be detected in any other way, on the basis that English is the 
lingua franca of the net

The layout could be something like:

*
---------
<box>
[[Welcome]] 
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcome%2C_newcomers> to 
[[Wikipedia <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia>*]], a 
collaborative project to produce a complete [[encyclopedia]] 
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia> in [[every language]] 
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:International_Wikipedia>. This 
is the {{$$Language$$}} wikipedia: select your language  to go to the 
Wikipedia in your language.

Language: {{pull down menu}}
</box>

 Anyone, including /you/, can edit any article right now, without even 
having to log in. You can copyedit, expand an article, write a little or 
write a lot. See the Wikipedia FAQ 
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ> for more background 
information about the project, and the help page 
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help> for information on how to 
use and contribute to Wikipedia.

{{Main page content from the main page of the localised version}}
---------

We could also be cute, and
* if we can detect, for example, a user with Greek browser settings 
viewing the en.wikipedia.org page, add an extra bit of text to the UI 
saying in Greek "[[Welcome]]! [[Wikipedia]] is also available in the 
[[Greek language]]" with the links being to the appropriate pages in the 
Greek Wikipedia.
* We could even add the portal prompt in random languages even when we 
can't guess the language, so an Urdu user browsing the English wiki with 
an English browser from the US will -- sooner or later -- see their 
language prompt.

So, think of this as a "portal header" for the front page, and a "portal 
prompt" added to all content.

We could also use the language guessed from the user's IP address, based 
on analysis of other users' logins and the fact that the public Internet 
does not in general route anything smaller than a /19  (a block of 8192 
addresses). Of course, this is a poor way of doing things, given that 
language != ISP != nation != nationality, but it's better than a totally 
random guess: perhaps in this case we should use the guessed language 
for the "portal prompt" half the time, and a random one the rest.