On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 22:55:35 +0100, Paweł 'Ausir' Dembowski fallout@lexx.eu.org wrote:
PP> www.wikipedia.org ends up as not particularly useful to anyone, and hard PP> to make non-ugly. Thus not much of a benefit, and we have to weigh PP> against the "broken" links to www.wikipedia.org that have built up over PP> the years.
Unlike Amazon, other languages are not just foreign divisions of the American company, but Wikipedia is an attempt at making a real multilanguage encyclopedia. Are you saying that Wikipedia should be US-centric?
Wikipedia ought not be US-centric, or English-centric. In the short term, however, it benefits Wikipedia to be useful to people who wish to use it, and I would suspect there are still more of these interested in en: than any other language. There will be considerable numbers of casual readers who will be deterred by having to make any choice on language, however trivial.
At the very least, the current portal could be changed to say "Select your preferred language" or some such thing. I suspect there are many English speakers who would not even recognize the list currently on www.wikipedia.org as a list of languages. People who have no exposure to languages beyond their own can have a very low tolerance for reading foreign words before flinging up their hands in exasperation.
(Even here in Canada, an English-speaking country that is more bilingual than most, I have known people who have become confused, irritated, or even enraged at hearing "for English, press one" on voicemail systems.)
For a larger solution: I suggest we seriously consider the idea of auto-forwarding based on some combination of user location or browser language settings. Of course, a user must be able to override this.
Steve