Definitely. The only purpose it should serve is to direct the user to the desired Wikipedia. There are "search" and "go" boxes at the respective Wikipedias.
Another issue is size. All the languages with over 100 articles will easily fit in a minimalist portal, but if you want to have search and go boxes, article of the week, whatever, for each one - even if you restrict it to above 1000 articles - it's going to be gargantuan and un-useful.
One prediction I have is that somebody will suggest adding flags to make it easier to choose languages. This is a BAD idea because there are speakers of French in Japan, speakers of Thai in Malta, speakers of Catalan in Greece, etc; also some languages are indigenous to more than one country, or they don't have a corresponding flag (for diaspora languages such as Yiddish and Ladino), or it's not recognizable to most speakers of the language.
Mark
On Sat, 8 Jan 2005 23:53:45 +0200, NSK nsk2@wikinerds.org wrote:
On Saturday 08 January 2005 23:36, David Gerard wrote:
That must be some sort of absolute minimalist portal, then ... which I'm *not* sure is the best portal.
A minimalist portal is the best thing you can have.
-- NSK The Wikinerds Community Federation of Science Wikis Owner of the Wikinerds Portal http://portal.wikinerds.org Owner of the NerdyPC IT Wiki http://www.nerdypc.org _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l