1)There's a need for a portal page stating the existence of all the wikis, a few infos about each, and a direct link to each. This page should be at wikipedia.org.
Unfortunately, the portal page is just about the most bankrupt concept possible in terms of usability, and online, usability is just about all you've got. The harm of adding one more click to users, both new and old, is measurable and huge.
One more click *only once* does not look like *huge* to me. Only once. And one more login *only once* even less.
www.wikipedia.org already has all the portalness it needs in its two paragraphs of intro. The article count should probably count all the languages, but that's about it.
Maybe there is a confusion here. Right now, the www.wikipedia.org is the english wikipedia. Right now, on the actual www.wikipedia.org, there is *little way* a user not fluent in english, will have the idea to scroll and look everywhere, down to the bottom of the page, inside a crowded list of international links, to find the link to a latin wikipedia. Right now, the www.wikipedia.org introduction text is entirely in english.
So how does the actual www.wikipedia.org page could be considered a portal ??? Sorry I don't get it. Maybe, we should then think about what a portal is, because we obviously are not talking about the same thing.
The www.wikipedia.org portal page I am talking about is something inspired from the one Tarquin and Mav and others have been working on at meta.
Are we on the same line of understanding here, or are we just talking of two different things ?
Right now the different language versions of WP are separate wikis; that should not be the permanent case. And that is what should be focused on here.
I would personnaly highly prefer interlinguage links are improved, before any portal page.
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