On 21/10/05, Gerrit Holl <gerrit(a)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these links are technically "incorrect" anyway (at the very least, out
of date) it doesn't seem worth trying too hard to give the "perfect"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]