On Thursday 10 October 2002 04:39 pm, LDC wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
...Part of the reason why we were getting good vibes from them on reunification is due to our then tentative plans to move the English Wikipedia to en.wikipedia.org. So without this small concession by us, I don't think there is a good chance for them rejoining our project. The English Wikipedia won't be harmed by being placed at en.wikipedia.org -- this is the only fair and neutral thing to do.
Poppycock. There absolutely /no/ technical benefit to this change, and it will cause massive problems by changing the URL of every page indexed by every search engine in the life of the project and increase server load.
This isn't about technical issues -- Google will just reindex the site and all current www links can point to en. It took Google about a month, but it already has done this with the .org change.
If its only purpose is to placate a few Spanish-speaking folk, then I say let them get over it.
Maybe you should actually read my entire post. I stated very clearly that www.wikipedia.org should be the home of the foundation and a portal to all the projects. The reunification para was only one part of my post.
We're not here to stroke their egos. We're here to create a product that will be useful to our users--88% of whom speak English (estimated from server logs).
Which came first? The very prominent and large English Wikipedia or the large English speaking user base? One of the reasons why Wikipedia is overwhelmingly dominated by English only speakers is because we emphasize the English Wikipedia so much. If we emphasize the non-English Wikipedias more or less equally with the English one then the non-English Wikipedias' user-base and article count will rise accordingly.
And so what if ~90% of our visitors are English speakers? How are they at all harmed by having in the English Wikipedia at en.wikipedia instead of www.wikipedia? How about minority rights? Shall we just brush them away? I'm not at all convinced that most of those ~90% would support the status quo or even care. Therefore we should err on the side keeping the whole Wikipedia community happy and together.
We'll make real, substantive progress soon when we get the non-profit running and better integrate the new software. Without that, no amount of symbolic fluff will matter; with it, the Spanish-speakers will have no reason to worry about minor little nits like domain names.
I know from experience that when you are treated like a second class citizen symbolism and well-intended gestures become very important (The en.wiki thing is just the most visible part of the puzzle). Also with the current status-quo where is the foundation's website going to be located? On the English Wikipedia or at foundation.wikipedia.org? Either way this does carry symbolic meaning ("foundation" is in English) that will be viewed negatively by many non-English speakers.
Have patience, all will be well.
I'm not so sure. Perhaps some empathy is in order; What would you want to occur if you were treated as a second class citizen?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)