Sj wrote:

A global portal is a fine idea; has been for many moons. But why in the world did this change happen with such little notice?

This has been a subject of discussion for years. Decisions were made repeatedly and publicly that it should be done.

I've been largely offline for the past week, and didn't see the initial conversation; afaict the idea of a portal seems to have gone from suggestion on wikipedia-l to reality in the span of a day, without notice on the en wikipedia.

Everyone should have been considering themselves on notice for years now. I wasn't even aware www.wikipedia.org WASN'T previously directing to a portal until people started complaining about this, that's how long it's been since I've gone to www.wikipedia.org. I thought this had already been taken care of ages ago.

It was not at all urgent, and the sudden change breaks the usability of existing links and shortcuts [though I'd heard a portal was being

It breaks no links or shortcuts that don't go explicitly to "http://www.wikipedia.org/". Anything UNDER www.wikipedia.org has been redirected to en.wikipedia.org for a long time now, and still is. And anyone that has bookmarked anything in that time has it bookmarked under en.wikipedia.org, because the redirection is explicit and the address the browser is using actually changes.

set up, this is how I found out just now that the portal is still English-centric, hard to navigate, and slow to load].

I don't see any particularly avoidable english-centrism (we can't duplicate everything in every language, and English is essentially the lingua franca of academics and even the internet; much as I hate the language, it's presently the logical choice for certain things), nor do I see anything hard to navigate. If there's a problem, you can edit the portal yourself on meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wikipedia.org_portal

Knock yourself out.

As for "slow to load", that's a problem all Wikimedia sites are currently experiencing, and has nothing at all to do with the portal.

I wish everyone had waited to implement this until the portal were more usable and better announced, and redirection policy better discussed. But perhaps noone else noticed...

Redirection policy was decided 2+ years ago and has already been implemented for a significant portion of that time. You never noticed that www.wikipedia.org/wiki/<anything> would redirect you to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<anything> ?

+sj+

(For instance, I think anyone coming form a US or UK IP with browser-lang set to English should still get redirected to the en: main page, perhaps with a visible line atop the current page-layout with links to the portal and a language dropdown... this will help a vast # of visitors who hit [www.]wikipedia.org)

Such detection is incredibly unreliable to the point that I've taken explicit steps in the past to assist automatic language detection mechanisms (widespread, pseudo-standard ones, mind you, not strange home-grown solutions) detect me as needing an English page and still wound up with pages in German or Russian or some other random language that I most assuredly do not speak despite the presence of an English version that the mechanism SHOULD have directed me to.