[Wikipedia-l] Re: neutral www.wikipedia.org desperately needed

[Daniel Mayer]

On Monday 21 October 2002 12:01 pm, Chuck Smith wrote:
> I can't say how important, wichtig, importante and
> grava it is that www.wikipedia.org is an opening page
> to the multilingual project.  First of all, it gives
> newcomers a quick introduction to the Wikipedia
> project and current users would just go directly to
> their version.  Showing that we have multiple
> languages immediately should be attractive, not a
> turnoff.

I agree completely - es muy importante. 

> A week ago, I went to a bilingual (eo-en) conference
> on human rights in Strasbourg and one of the matters
> we discussed was the issue of language rights.
> Generally the "more powerful" languages don't give
> equality to the minority languages.  This is
> understandable in organizations where more working
> languages bring a greater cost, but in the case of
> Wikipedia, cost is not an issue.

Yup. 

> In the Wikipedia project, every language should have
> EQUAL rights and EQUAL opportunity for promotion, etc.
>  This is only possible by moving the English Wikipedia
> to en.wikipedia.org, and making www.wikipedia.org a
> neutral multilingual page.  It is not just a matter of
> politics, it's a matter of language discrimination.

I'm still with you here.  However, one of the most powerful things we now have 
on the Main Page is a simple, direct and easy to find link to Recent Changes. 
Simply throwing up a multi-lingual welcome page that only really points 
people to each of the different languages isn't a good solution at all. Yes, 
I know I was advocating moving the English Wikipedia to en.wiki forcibly 
before but that was to set-up the possibility for EL/es.wiki reunification. 
Now that EL has decided the issue for us there is no longer any urgency for a 
move -- so long as we agree that a move should be made. 

I am content to wait and do this right instead of being hasty and doing it 
wrong. Specifically if/when all languages are in the same database (see my 
many emails on this - I don't wish to explain it again) and we can have a 
combined Recent Changes at www.wikipedia.org then we can move the English 
wiki to a home that follows the same syntax as all the others.

If we did this right now we would still have www.wikipedia.org going to 
en.wiki's Main Page. This is putting the cart in front of the horse. We 
should first work on making a magnificently useful Front Page for the whole 
project before we start changing URLs.  

> If there was a neutral language page, I would prefer
> to send people at my Esperanto Wikipedia lectures to
> www.wikipedia.org, so they could also see that there
> is an opportunity to contribute to their native
> language Wikipedia as well.  Please understand the
> feelings of the language minorities.
>
> Thank you,
> Chuck

I agree that a move should be made, but due to the fact /that/ 
www.wikipedia.org is so important and visible, we should do this the correct 
way and not hastily. In the interim the wording on the English Wikipedia Main 
Page has been tweaked to obviously indicate that there are Wikipedias in 
others languages and it also provides a link to a page that has all the 
non-English Wikipedias listed. This isn't the best solution but it will 
probably have to do until/if the multilingual Wikipedia Phase IV comes out 
that combines the now separate language databases (again, defualts would 
ensure everything looks the same as it does now - everybody please read the 
previous posts and metapedia to learn how this might work :-).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

Related links
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_international_Wikipedias_as_part_of_the_main_community