At 2002-10-16 18:44 -0700, Stephen Gilbert wrote:
--- Brion VIBBER brion@pobox.com wrote:
It was suggested in the first place because many people (including Cunctator) are begging for the abilities to:
- Have a single username and login for the
encyclopedia in all languages and meta
- View things like Recentchanges for the
encyclopedia in multiple languages and/or meta combined.
These demand a single server.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
They also demand input from the other language wikis. We'll have a lot of unhappy people if we take a vote on this list, then move the wikis to www.wikipedia.org/xx/.
The support expressed from the other wikis was to move the English Wikipedia to en.wikipedia.org, which is a different matter: the change only affects the English wiki.
What we are arguing about is a flaw in the design of URL's:
The basic format http://www.site.com/path0/path1 should have been: http://com/site/www/path0/path1
How it is organized server-wise doesn't matter to the user. By the way, everyone can easily see that 'www' is redundant in this notation. 'com' versus 'org' etc. also doesn't make much sense, because there is no 'ibm.org', 'ibm' is always 'ibm.com'.
But as things are now, I think 'mav'-s suggestions make a lot of sense. I think the www should be added in all cases, so you can leave 'http://' out.
As regards centralizing the whole system on one server, I have mixed feelings: On the one hand, I believe that individual language sites should be able to be independent, but who would benefit? The users or the ego's of the developers? I guess the latter. On the other hand: One big project (which has many advantages) might collapse at a certain point, whilst a decentralized approach might offer more chances of survival.
As it stands I tend to lean towards keeping it all central. Bandwidth-wise this isn't a real problem as long as the central server is inside of the USA. Most providers outside of the USA buy 50% local bandwidth and 50% bandwidth to the USA.
Keeping the stuff central also means that most things will be the same on all language variations of the site, which benefits the user. I see no reason why some of the sites would use a green color to indicate articles that don't exist yet and others still use a '?' behind the link. I'd also like to have to log-in only once for all sites.
As regards the entry-page which looses 20-40% viewers. I think, it's a valid point. I am not opposed to www.wikipedia.org being the entrance to the English version, but treating all languages the same also has it's charms.
I have been searching the Netscape site for a while earlier today, because I seemed to remember that it had some sort of solution for the language problem. I think that one could write several files like index.html.en index.html.de index.html.nl and in your browser you (as a client) could give a sequence of prefered languages and even when just asking for index.html you would get it in the language that you liked best. Of course I hate intelligent systems that make (usually wrong) decessions for me. I don't have a prefered language that I want to read everything in. When the orginal language is German and the translations are bad I prefer to read the original German text, the same goes for English and Dutch. But in case of French and Italian etc. I prefer a bad translation over the original.
Ah, and back again about the server issue: I don't see why http://www.nl.wikipedia.org/ can more easily be on a server in another country than http://www.wikipedia.org/nl/. I tend to assume that these redirection issues have already been solved.
I tend to like the second format better, but somehow I don't really feel comfortable with the language being coded into the path. I don't know why. I'll program myself to dream about this problem tonight...
Greetings, Jaap