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.