On Friday 24 January 2003 04:00 am, wikipedia-l-request@wikipedia.org wrote:
- If we use a portal, it should at least offer some additional features,
such as a multi-language search and multi-language Recent Changes. This is not possible with the current software because all Wikipedias are separate.
Regards,
Erik
Ditto. I'm all for waiting for a multilanguage phase IV or at least a multilanguage enhanced phase III before going live with the multilanguage portal.
A portal would be just symbolic windowdressing if we don't at least have a unified user database and the ability to easily search all languages at once (sorry Brion your nifty meta search thingy is still just a nifty little thingy) . Other features such a unified Recent Changes linked from the portal, better handling of interlanguage links and the ability to select the language your interface is in are also important but not vital to the success of a portal.
A multilanguage portal is a big change that explicitly states our website is multilanguage enabled -- except for some clumsy multilanguage links, it isn't. We should do this right and actually have the software catch-up with our expectations about what our project is.
Until a portal and the multilanguage-enabled software behind it are ready, we could implement the 'browser language sniffing' idea so that people are automatically brought to the language which corresponds to their browser settings (if that wiki has say, more than 100 articles and has been upgraded - otherwise they go to the English Wikipedia as they do now).
We should also think about moving the English Wikipedia from http://www.wikipeida.org to http://wikipedia.org/en/ as Brion and others have suggested. But we could just as easily wait for the multilanguage phase IV and then move all the wikis to http://wikipedia.org/%7Blanguage code}/ as they are upgraded and converted to the new common database. Aside: IMO having what look like separate URLs only tends to enforce the feeling that we are not one multilanguage project.
A portal right now would be pure symbolism. I and several others have spent many hours reworking the English Main Page. A big part of the reworking was to give links to and about the other languages more prominence. Additional suggestions are still welcome of course.
--mav
WikiKarma: I updated all the year pages and many of the other articles linked from [[January 21]] and [[January 22]].