On 21/10/05, Gerrit Holl gerrit@nl.linux.org wrote:
Hi,
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl. It shouldn't. Should it provide a list off all Wikipedia's with an article [[Chernobyl]]?
One of the reasons for this is because historically it has always meant that - well, that's kind of obvious, but what I mean is that there are existing links on other websites (and who knows where else) of the form "http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/<article>", intending to reference the English Wikipedia specifically.
That said, I actually rather like the idea of auto-listing all languages whose Wikipedia has an article with that exact name - it doesn't exactly *break* those links, but it serves as an interesting introduction to/reminder of the multilingual nature of Wikipedia, and indeed of the Internet in general. It's all to easy for English-speakers such as myself to take for granted that all content will default to English, when, really, why should it?
Of course, there are theoretically mechanisms for detecting the browser's language, so if they were reliable (which I'm not 100% convinced about) we could use those to redirect. But then that still requires a default if, say, my browser declares I "accept" German or French, but the article exists only in English or Spanish. And since these links are technically "incorrect" anyway (at the very least, out of date) it doesn't seem worth trying too hard to give the "perfect" result for someone using them.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]