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