Aaron Adrignola, 11/12/2010 05:01:

The following is an important point by Fajro:

...

Google has links to their other sites in the top of every poge: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fajro/5249799850/in/set-72157625445178785/ Wikipedia "sister proyects" are also relegated to the bottom of the page.

The idea of a navigation bar to the other projects was floated in the mailing list post by Erik Moeller mentioned earlier as well.[1]

It's an interesting point (and almost in topic).

Say the projects were all renamed. Great. What's changed? Only the name on each page and likely the logo in the upper left. Will the smaller projects magically get more readers and editors and Google page rank? No.

In fact the proposers of renaming or merging want to kill the sisterprojects, see e.g. the proposal linked above. I don't think this proposal is worth discussing again, at least not here.

We know Wikipedia is huge and gets all the attention from the Foundation and the appeals from *Wikipedia* "authors" showing up on all the sister projects just reinforce that. But as long as links to related content at sister projects are relegated to the bottom of articles per the Wikipedia Manual of Style and the suggested navigation links to sister projects go unimplemented, nothing will change, regardless of what you want to call the projects.

Please note that you're talking about en.wiki; French, Italian and some more projects have links to sisterprojects also in the sidebar, above interwikis. We don't know how much they're used, but they're certainly a good thing.

Nemo