Daniel Mayer (maveric149@yahoo.com) [050108 19:40]:
--- Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
I'd like to start out by noting that www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to the english wikipedia's main page. Instead, it's been turned into a replica of the language template. Deeper links ( www.wikipedia.org/wiki/name_of_article ) still work, but the main page does not.
Doing this was the general consensus a very long time ago (about a year ago I think). The only real issue was that noone could come up with a good technical solution that most people liked. That still seems to be the case.
It was mentioned again on wikipedia-l because this is an international project, not just en:, and so Tim Starling finally put it into place. Magnus Manske is also working on some slightly fancier portal stuff, hopefully to make it as nice as, say, www.wikipedia.ch, with auto-highlighting of those languages one's browser is set to accept.
Thread starts at http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-January/036522.html . This thread (not this message) also names the two pages that go to make up the front page portal.
Basically, not making it en-only was so OBVIOUSLY the right thing (because, ahh, it isn't en-only - en's front page is en.wikipedia.org) that people just went 'w00t!' and dived right in.
Instead we should have a design competition in order to encourage the creation of better solutions on what to put at www.wikipedia.org.
Or in the meantime, we can edit this page ;-)
It's starting small and getting better, pretty quickly.
- d.