[Wikipedia-l] every decision has a down side

[Tom Parmenter]

For my sins I spent many years as a minor manager and learned very
little, but I did learn the following: 

     Every decision has a down side.  If there were no cost to making
     a decision, there would be no difficulty in making it.  Indeed,
     there would be no decison to make.

In the present case of an opening page:

-- Multilingual page -- builds and advertises the multilingual
   wikipedia at the cost of distracting and possibly driving away
   readers with a limited-content page, mostly in languages they don't
   speak (et cetera)

-- Automatic redirect to language setting of browser -- takes the
   reader where they probably want to go at the cost of annoying them
   with our arrogance if that isn't what they want (et cetera)

No amount of discussion can make either of these costs go away.  I
would rather pay the second cost.  Other people would rather pay the
first.

For the record, I could read a reasonably simple article in English,
Spanish, and German, and a list of Christmas baked goods in Norwegian.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88