On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 22:55:35 +0100, Paweł 'Ausir' Dembowski fallout@lexx.eu.org wrote:
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?
This is a good point - sitting here in the UK, I frequently forget that amazon.com will take me to the *US* site; perhaps if I was in Germany, it would try harder, but Nicholas Knight suggests this kind of thing isn't very reliable.
I notice Google.com now redirects to Google.co.uk, which is nice, so maybe it *is* possible, but Google have a hell of a lot of resources to throw at this kind of thing, and yet have taken years to get that working. I remember seeing references to them doing this for Canada long ago, and wondering why the same trick couldn't be used for the UK; I believe they do it by IP address of something. Which means, of course, that it wouldn't be much good for a strictly *language*-based, rather than *geographic* test, which is what Wikipedia.com needs...