My objection is not to putting English Wikipedia an en.wikipedia.org but to REDIRECTING www.wikipedia.org to en.wikipedia.org -- it would perpetuate the problem it claims to be solving.
Let's first ask all the various language groups who are actively building The Wikipedia how they would prefer for their readers to find them. And ask what www.wikipedia.org should be, to serve each language group.
Is English really the world's international language? Or just a vestige of British Imperialism (fueled by US Imperialism)? (I believe neither of these myself.)
Maybe first-time visitors to www.wikipedia.org should get a chance to choose their favorite language. Or the page could detect their language setting and users with View-Encoding-Japanese would be greeted in Japanese, with alternate links for the other languages below.
This isn't as easy as changing the suffix from .com to .org -- I think.
Ed Poor
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
My objection is not to putting English Wikipedia an en.wikipedia.org but to REDIRECTING www.wikipedia.org to en.wikipedia.org -- it would
perpetuate
the problem it claims to be solving.
Ed, that's exactly what we do now, only you continue to see the WWW in the URL instead of the EN. Links to www.wikipedia.(com|org)/wiki/blabla _need_ to redirect to the English wiki because we've got thousands of such links in search engines, bookmarks, and links from other sites.
As far as the main page...
Let's first ask all the various language groups who are actively building The Wikipedia how they would prefer for their readers to find them.
And ask
what www.wikipedia.org should be, to serve each language group.
Isn't that what we're doing at: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org ?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org