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.
First of all, this is a MAJOR, MAJOR change and was totally unannounced. Nor did anyone in the community get a chance to object before it was put into place. (Because I suspect there would have been a major outcry)
Second of all, I cannot fathom why the this was changed. By now, there's a huge inertia behind the fact that www.wikipeda.org links to the english main page. This is going to break *MANY* links, bookmarks, etc. We (the english Wikipedia) are goings to lose significant number of potential contributors because of this.
Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told before hand, or even afterward?
--Mark
I would also like to know why this was changed. It's the first I've heard of it!
TSBDY
Mark Pellegrini 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.
First of all, this is a MAJOR, MAJOR change and was totally unannounced. Nor did anyone in the community get a chance to object before it was put into place. (Because I suspect there would have been a major outcry)
Second of all, I cannot fathom why the this was changed. By now, there's a huge inertia behind the fact that www.wikipeda.org links to the english main page. This is going to break *MANY* links, bookmarks, etc. We (the english Wikipedia) are goings to lose significant number of potential contributors because of this.
Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told before hand, or even afterward?
--Mark
csherlock@ljh.com.au wrote:
I would also like to know why this was changed. It's the first I've heard of it!
TSBDY
Mark Pellegrini 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.
First of all, this is a MAJOR, MAJOR change and was totally unannounced. Nor did anyone in the community get a chance to object before it was put into place. (Because I suspect there would have been a major outcry)
Second of all, I cannot fathom why the this was changed. By now, there's a huge inertia behind the fact that www.wikipeda.org links to the english main page. This is going to break *MANY* links, bookmarks, etc. We (the english Wikipedia) are goings to lose significant number of potential contributors because of this.
Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told before hand, or even afterward?
--Mark
These changes were made after some discussion on Wikipedia-l, but that's still not the same as talking to those who will be affected.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
John Lee wrote:
These changes were made after some discussion on Wikipedia-l, but that's still not the same as talking to those who will be affected.
I must confess I'm confused as to who will be affected.
Anyone going to www.wikipedia.org will be able to click one link to get to the English version (or any other version).
Anyone going to www.wikipedia.org/wiki/anything will be redirected to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/anything, as has been occurring for I-don't-know-how-long.
What's the problem, exactly?
Nicholas Knight wrote:
John Lee wrote:
These changes were made after some discussion on Wikipedia-l, but that's still not the same as talking to those who will be affected.
I must confess I'm confused as to who will be affected.
Anyone going to www.wikipedia.org will be able to click one link to get to the English version (or any other version).
Anyone going to www.wikipedia.org/wiki/anything will be redirected to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/anything, as has been occurring for I-don't-know-how-long.
What's the problem, exactly?
The problem is that the main page is exceedingly dull and off-putting to new users. It's also not clear what we are all about, and gives to good example of the hard work we have put into Wikipedia.
.org is a US domain, a country that speaks primarily English. Those who visit it are reasonably expected to speak English.
TBSDY
On 9 Jan 2005, at 22:39, csherlock@ljh.com.au wrote:
The problem is that the main page is exceedingly dull and off-putting to new users.
This was already fixed in the past: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? title=Www.wikipedia.org_portal&oldid=88465
.org is a US domain, a country that speaks primarily English. Those who visit it are reasonably expected to speak English.
I'm very tempted to respond with a long-winded political rant, but I think one word sums it up: Sheesh.
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Jens Ropers wrote:
On 9 Jan 2005, at 22:39, csherlock@ljh.com.au wrote:
The problem is that the main page is exceedingly dull and off-putting to new users.
This was already fixed in the past: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? title=Www.wikipedia.org_portal&oldid=88465
.org is a US domain, a country that speaks primarily English. Those who visit it are reasonably expected to speak English.
I'm very tempted to respond with a long-winded political rant, but I think one word sums it up: Sheesh.
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Nice. What a polite person you are. It appears that I made a mistake, but there was no need for a response like that.
TBSDY
On Sunday 09 January 2005 23:39, csherlock@ljh.com.au wrote:
.org is a US domain, a country that speaks primarily English. Those who visit it are reasonably expected to speak English.
No, .org and .com and .net have nothing to do with US. They are stateless domains intended for international use. The proper US domain is .us
csherlock@ljh.com.au wrote:
.org is a US domain, a country that speaks primarily English. Those who visit it are reasonably expected to speak English.
No, it's really not. All countries, including the US, have their own top-level domain reflective of their name and/or country code (the US, unsurprisingly, is .us). The others, including .net, .org, .com, and newer ones like .info and .biz, are not associated with any particular nation or language. They're intended for certain classes of organizations, but even this is rarely *enforced*, with a couple exceptions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_TLDs
On Sunday 09 January 2005 23:39, csherlock@ljh.com.au wrote:
.org is a US domain, a country that speaks primarily English. Those who visit it are reasonably expected to speak English.
I should add that English is not the official language of USA. It just happens that most people in USA speak English.
Mark Pellegrini 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.
First of all, this is a MAJOR, MAJOR change and was totally unannounced. Nor did anyone in the community get a chance to object before it was put into place. (Because I suspect there would have been a major outcry)
Second of all, I cannot fathom why the this was changed. By now, there's a huge inertia behind the fact that www.wikipeda.org links to the english main page. This is going to break *MANY* links, bookmarks, etc. We (the english Wikipedia) are goings to lose significant number of potential contributors because of this.
Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told before hand, or even afterward?
Don't you read wikipedia-l? It was discussed there and announced there.
-- Tim Starling
I agree, it should show the main page again. This is bad. They could move the links to the other Wikipedias on top of the English page instead of at the bottom of all those templates. And Wikipedia is really slow already, having another thing to click through won't help. But I guess they want us to use http://en.wikipedia.org. :( Change it back. --Cookiecaper.
-----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Mark Pellegrini Sent: Saturday, January 08, 2005 12:43 AM To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to the en main page
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.
First of all, this is a MAJOR, MAJOR change and was totally unannounced. Nor did anyone in the community get a chance to object before it was put into place. (Because I suspect there would have been a major outcry)
Second of all, I cannot fathom why the this was changed. By now, there's a huge inertia behind the fact that www.wikipeda.org links to the english main page. This is going to break *MANY* links, bookmarks, etc. We (the english Wikipedia) are goings to lose significant number of potential contributors because of this.
Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told before hand, or even afterward?
--Mark
_______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
--- 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.
Instead we should have a design competition in order to encourage the creation of better solutions on what to put at www.wikipedia.org.
-- mav
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
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.
On Saturday 08 January 2005 14:24, David Gerard wrote:
hopefully to make it as nice as, say, www.wikipedia.ch, with
I don't think wikipedia.ch is a good multilingual homepage as I find it discriminatory. Better use a design similar to http://www.europa.eu.int or http://www.europarl.eu.int
NSK (nsk2@wikinerds.org) [050109 01:11]:
On Saturday 08 January 2005 14:24, David Gerard wrote:
hopefully to make it as nice as, say, www.wikipedia.ch, with
I don't think wikipedia.ch is a good multilingual homepage as I find it discriminatory.
How? Because the languages are in an order?
Better use a design similar to http://www.europa.eu.int or http://www.europarl.eu.int
You mean pretty much what www.wikipedia.org is doing right now ;-)
I think the present version (separating out large and small languages) beats the previous version, [[m:The_provisional_portal_of_Wikipedia]], on sheer usability.
- d.
On Saturday 08 January 2005 16:17, David Gerard wrote:
How? Because the languages are in an order?
The order is chosen with Western-American values. According to what I see on my screen when I access wikipedia.ch, the Japanese and Greek languages are not emphasised at all. The German language is emphasised more than Spanish. The languages are not in alphabetic order. It is discriminatory and should not be applied on wikipedia.org
NSK wrote:
On Saturday 08 January 2005 16:17, David Gerard wrote:
How? Because the languages are in an order?
The order is chosen with Western-American values. According to what I see on my screen when I access wikipedia.ch, the Japanese and Greek languages are not emphasised at all. The German language is emphasised more than Spanish. The languages are not in alphabetic order. It is discriminatory and should not be applied on wikipedia.org
How many articles are there in the German WP? How many in the Spanish one? Could it be that emphasis is according to total number of articles rather than any (potentially mistaken) perceived bias?
-a
On Saturday 08 January 2005 16:52, Arkady Rose wrote:
How many articles are there in the German WP? How many in the Spanish one? Could it be that emphasis is according to total number of articles rather than any (potentially mistaken) perceived bias?
The current wikipedia.org portal explains (in English) that the order is according to the number of articles of each Wikipedia. I find no language or cultural discrimination in wikipedia.org, except for the fact that using the English word "articles" and not an icon or image is itself discriminatory.
But the wikipedia.ch page does not explain that it any way, so most people will find it discriminatory.
NSK (nsk2@wikinerds.org) [050109 02:01]:
On Saturday 08 January 2005 16:52, Arkady Rose wrote:
How many articles are there in the German WP? How many in the Spanish one? Could it be that emphasis is according to total number of articles rather than any (potentially mistaken) perceived bias?
The current wikipedia.org portal explains (in English) that the order is according to the number of articles of each Wikipedia. I find no language or cultural discrimination in wikipedia.org, except for the fact that using the English word "articles" and not an icon or image is itself discriminatory.
The English word 'articles' is problematic, I agree - as, more so, are the links "Complete list . Multilingual coordination . Start a Wikipedia in another language".
I'm not sure of an icon that would mean "articles" *blindingly obviously*, which it would need to in order to be less worse than having it in English. Even less so for those three other links. Also, what would you use for the alt= or title= text?
The portal page could do with some links on the left, as per the Monobook skin - specifically to meta, wikimediafoundation and probably to the other projects. If someone who can edit protected pages on meta could please do this ...
- d.
On Saturday 08 January 2005 17:44, David Gerard wrote:
I'm not sure of an icon that would mean "articles" *blindingly obviously*,
I would do this: en/fr/de/etc represented by n.articles/10000 icons of books. So, a Wikipedia with 100000 articles would be represented by 10 books. In case too large and too small values create problems, you can use a logarithmic scale.
Another idea is to use a graph: Axis x will represent language families and axis y will represent the number of articles. The points on the graph will represent individual languages, within their language family. So, Asian languages would be, for example, first because A is the first letter of the alphabet. Then we would have Germanic and Romance languages etc. Perhaps I should draw a picture to show you what I mean, exactly, but I don't have the time.
1. German and French are over Japanese in the .ch portal because .CH is the country code for Switzerland. - It makes sense to emphasize languages used in Switzerland in the .CH portal.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: NSK nsk2@wikinerds.org Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 16:55:12 +0200 Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to the en main page To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org
On Saturday 08 January 2005 16:17, David Gerard wrote:
How? Because the languages are in an order?
The order is chosen with Western-American values. According to what I see on my screen when I access wikipedia.ch, the Japanese and Greek languages are not emphasised at all. The German language is emphasised more than Spanish. The languages are not in alphabetic order. It is discriminatory and should not be applied on wikipedia.org
-- NSK The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
NSK wrote:
The order is chosen with Western-American values. According to what I see on my screen when I access wikipedia.ch, the Japanese and Greek languages are not emphasised at all. The German language is emphasised more than Spanish. The languages are not in alphabetic order. It is discriminatory and should not be applied on wikipedia.org
I designed wikipedia.ch. The reason that some languages are more prominently displayed is that these are the official languages in Switzerland (german, french, italian, rumantsch) and english is the lingua franca in the western world.
It is true that not all languages are shown, this is because I didn't want to overload the page.
Regards, Stephan
[[en:User:Stw]] [[de:Benutzer:Stw]]
Stephan Walter wrote:
NSK wrote:
The order is chosen with Western-American values. According to what I see on my screen when I access wikipedia.ch, the Japanese and Greek languages are not emphasised at all. The German language is emphasised more than Spanish. The languages are not in alphabetic order. It is discriminatory and should not be applied on wikipedia.org
I designed wikipedia.ch. The reason that some languages are more prominently displayed is that these are the official languages in Switzerland (german, french, italian, rumantsch) and english is the lingua franca in the western world.
It is true that not all languages are shown, this is because I didn't want to overload the page.
The design makes perfect sense. Please don't listen to this odd complaint and change it. 'ch' is Switzerland. Anyone who can't grasp why the 'ch' portal should emphasize German more than Spanish, Japanese, and Greek, well...
--Jimbo
http://www.europa.eu.int is cool.
Christiaan
On 8 Jan 2005, at 2:18 pm, NSK wrote:
On Saturday 08 January 2005 14:24, David Gerard wrote:
hopefully to make it as nice as, say, www.wikipedia.ch, with
I don't think wikipedia.ch is a good multilingual homepage as I find it discriminatory. Better use a design similar to http://www.europa.eu.int or http://www.europarl.eu.int
-- NSK The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
--- David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
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.
I'm well aware of that and completely agree. I just don't like the fact that we went live with a lame solution before developing something good. I know that wikiwiki has always been cart-before-horse, but this is *very* visible real estate.
-- mav
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com
Daniel Mayer (maveric149@yahoo.com) [050109 03:28]:
--- David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
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.
I'm well aware of that and completely agree. I just don't like the fact that we went live with a lame solution before developing something good. I know that wikiwiki has always been cart-before-horse, but this is *very* visible real estate.
There is that. But it's improved noticeably over the last 24 hours and I expect shall continue to do so in rapid order.
Still need someone to put up the Japanese version of "The Free Encyclopedia" ...
- d.
On Saturday 08 January 2005 08:42, Mark Pellegrini wrote:
First of all, this is a MAJOR, MAJOR change and was totally unannounced. Nor did anyone in the community get a chance to object before it was put into place.
That was an good major change, and obviously good changes don't need to be objected, especially considering that the leader of the project agreed with it.
Seriously, in this case, it was thouroughly discussed in the mailing list, so actually anybody could object.
Mark-
Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told before hand, or even afterward?
Making www.wikipedia.org a multilingual portal has been suggested by many different people ever since the creation of new languages besides English. I point you, for example, to this summary by Elian written in October 2002, where a large number of people favored a multilingual portal:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/024522.html
The change from www.wikipedia.org to en.wikipedia.org was made in part to accommodate any future mulitilingual portal, and if you browse around Meta, you'll find several proposals for such a portal.
Not discriminating in favor of or against any particular widely spoken language is an important part of Wikimedia's mission. The fact that www.wikipedia.org redirected to the English Wikipedia has, for many, been a long-standing violation of this principle.
Partially in response, the English Wikipedia has in the past spent considerable energy on making the other languages more visible on the Main Page. Now that www.wikipedia.org is a portal, we can dare to make en.wikipedia.org a little more English-centric.
Why has the creation of the portal taken so long? Mostly because nobody wanted to make a decision about what the portal would look like. With Tim's solution, which is editable through Meta, the community can work this out over time.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Making www.wikipedia.org a multilingual portal has been suggested by many different people ever since the creation of new languages besides English. I point you, for example, to this summary by Elian written in October 2002, where a large number of people favored a multilingual portal:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/024522.html
It's been discussed, but there's never been a clear consensus that we should actually make the chnage.
-Mark
I'd like to all what has been said that there will be redir
Mark Pellegrini a écrit:
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.
First of all, this is a MAJOR, MAJOR change and was totally unannounced. Nor did anyone in the community get a chance to object before it was put into place. (Because I suspect there would have been a major outcry)
Hello.
If you are interested in any international matters, please register to wikipedia-l mailing list and check in http://meta.wikimedia.org where these topics are discussed.
Actually, this has been going on for more than two years, and was recently discussed on wikitech as well.
I invite to see that mail from Brion Vibber : http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/023565.html Which lead to a huge discussion.
See : http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/thread.html
This discussion revived from time to time :-)
Second of all, I cannot fathom why the this was changed. By now, there's a huge inertia behind the fact that www.wikipeda.org links to the english main page. This is going to break *MANY* links, bookmarks, etc. We (the english Wikipedia) are goings to lose significant number of potential contributors because of this.
Do not worry about this Mark. Articles are redirected.
Please check for example http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/agriculture
You will notice it is redirected to the english article, so no links will break. No bookmark will be entirely lost.
The best thing english reader will get to know in seing the page from now is that other languages exist, and this, many people just do not know yet. It is good they discover it.
Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told before hand, or even afterward?
--Mark
It was changed because the english is not a sphere around which everything gravitates anymore. The children grew up and they are getting recognition in the adult world. A parent should always be happy of this :-)
Anthere
about bloody time too. Congrats to tim. [[Be bold]] my preeties, be bold
On Sat, 8 Jan 2005 01:42:31 -0500, 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.