[Wikipedia-l] [Intlwiki-l] www.wikipedia.org design

[Toby Bartels]

The Cunctator wrote:
>Toby Bartels wrote:
>>The Cunctator wrote:
>>>>>elian wrote:

>>>>>>http://www.djini.de/Uploads/wikipedia/wikipedia.html

>>>3. This kind of page promotes the view that Wikipedia is a coalition of
>>>largely distinct projects, balkanized by language (and implicitly branded by
>>>nationality). I think this is very much the wrong approach.

>>OTC, this is what the current system does.
>>An international <www.*> is primarily being advanced
>>to fix precisely this problem.

>Note: the current page says "Welcome to Wikipedia, a collaborative project
>to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in every language."

But has no prominent links to any language other than English.

>Elian's page says something similar to the above, but also says:
>"Below you will find welcome messages and links to each of our active
>Wikipedia language projects."

>I challenge you to demonstrate that it is not the case that the above
>sentence promotes the view that Wikipedia is a coalition of largely distinct
>projects, balkanized by language.

The proof was mentioned by you already; it says at the very top
"Wikipedia is an international, multilingual collaborative project
"whose goal is to produce an interlinked open content, neutral and
"complete encyclopedia from scratch in every language.
Therefore it is not a coalition of largely distinct projects.
Ipso facto, the projects mentioned later must be subprojects;
that is the only logical conclusion (and clearly what elian intended too).

But yeah, the current wording towards the bottom could be approved.
It should just say something like "each of our active languages",
or at the very least say "subprojects" instead of "projects".

What I really don't understand about your objections
is your argument that an international home page is balkanising.
I mean, I totally cannot process this claim.
I'm not entirely pleased with the look of elian's proposal,
but it's axiomatic that the purpose is language integration.

>>Specifically, elian's suggestion can't be done without coding,
>>which is why mav is right to say that we need to get
>>an integrated Phase IV software (PediaWiki 4.0),
>>allowing integrated Recentchanges, integrated searches, etc.

Actually, I guess that it doesn't have a link to integrated Recentchanges,
just a link to integrated searching (which currently goes to [[en:]]
since integrated searching is not in actuality supported).
But it *should* have a link to integrated Recentchanges,
so we do still need to code this.

>We do this first, and I'll be happy. I've been suggesting this long before
>mav had. But I'm glad he agrees with me.

Yes, I thought that you would agree with this.
An integrated main page would not IMO *hurt* the project now,
but it would do a much better job of *helping* the project
under PediaWiki 4.0.

Unfortunately, you, mav, and I don't know PHP,
so we can only say what we would like to happen
while working on proposals for interlinguistic main pages.


-- Toby