From what I remember from past "unofficial poll"
(http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org), most people did not think that having www.wikipedia.org as a multi-language portal would be stupid.
That's right, and as someone who advocates voting, I will tolerate a portal if it is supported by the majority opinion. However,
1) Having the webserver automatically redirect the user to a Wikipedia in his language, based on the browser settings, is a much more transparent and obvious way of handling things. That's what, for example, Google and Debian do, both highly successful projects.
2) Even if we use a portal, we need to first make sure that old links, e.g.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry
stay valid, or we will get huge problems with existing web and Usenet references, search indices etc.
3) 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