On Sun, 18 Aug 2002, Stephen Gilbert wrote: The longer we wait, the worse it'll get. Besides, a clever apache rewrite would fix the problem until the search engines could catch up. -- Daniel

At 2002-08-18 23:58 +0200, Giskart wrote: I think it should be: http://www.nl.wikipedia.org/ http://www.be.wikipedia.org/ http://www.pt.wikipedia.org/ http://www.eo.wikipedia.org/ etc. I think that the english version should have two names: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/ and http://www.wikipedia.org/ Let's face it, English is the lingua franca on the internet! Otherwise we could make: http://www.wikipedia.org/ to be the 'portal' to the subdomains, but in which language should it be? I think all, the *.wikipedia.com sites should jump to the appropriate *.org page, but at the same time notifying intelligent search engines etc. that the page was moved and links to it should be changed. By the way, my own *chipdir* sites have so many non-correct links to them, that I gave up to ever get it right. Years ago when the MS-DOS/CD-ROM 8.3 filesystem names where still quite dominant I changed all the .html files to .htm files. I still UNIX-link the main .htm files to .html filenames or I would loose to many visitors (I guess). I also wrote a PHP-script to check out links in pages (mainly for in the chipdir) and there are so many sites out there that don't return the correct page result codes (404 and such), that it's hard to ever straighten that system out! There is a test version on: http://www.ii.nl/jaap/checkurl.php Please ignore all the error message (about the script), just fill in an URL in any of the two boxes and click it's button. When you fill in http://www.wikipedia.com/ it may take 5 minutes or so, since all links will be checked... Don't use the script too check complete sites, it's on a server hired by a friend. Email me for the source if you want it. I don't mind GPL'ing it. My local version may be improved in the mean time. Greetings, Jaap -- Chip Directory -- http://www.chipdir.org/ -- http://www.chipdir.nl/ -- http://www.embeddedlogic.com/chipdir/ - New in the USA -- And about 30 other mirror sites world-wide. -- -- To subscribe to a free 'chip issues, questions and answers' -- mailing list send a message to listguru(a)fatcity.com with -- in the body 'subscribe chipdir-L'. About 500 experts are -- willing to think with you about electronics problems etc.

Regarding urls: We have as much responsibility to usability as we do to political correctness. The best solution would handle both. The worst solution would hurt usability and encourage language balkanization. What are the parameters of the situation? 1) www.wikipedia.org (and its minor variants wikipedia.org and wikipedia.com) is and will forever remain the primary url. 2) Wikipedia is currently owned by an American company; it was started in English; the English Wikipedia is orders larger than any other, English is the lingua franca of the current times and of the Internet. All these may change but are true now. 3) We desire all the language Wikipedias to be on equal footing. Note that, for 3) to mean "equivalent in content", there would have to be some mechanism to compensate for real-world differences in the degree of participation in different languages. There will always be more English than Icelandic speakers, etc. A perfect such mechanism would be expert-quality automatic translation. That out of the way, let me suggest that changing URLs should only be a minor component of dealing with 3, not a primary focus. More effort should be put into building the cross-link capabilities, perhaps with some automatic dictionary translations. The wikipedias should all be running the same software. There should be the option of having Recent Changes show changes from any array of the languages, so that for a French contributor fluent in English, his Recent Changes (and thus his Wikipedia, to a large degree) looks like a French-English Wikipedia. Etc. I really think focussing only on the URLs is making us miss the big picture.

On 8/19/02 6:21 PM, "Stephen Gilbert" <canuck_in_korea2002(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Right. There are a lot of ways to make the Recent Changes page more useful. The trick is to figure out a way of doing so without allowing total balkanization. One reform/change I'd recommend is that for non-minor edits, something must be put in the summary. That still trusts users enough not to waste their time on minor edits, but forces them to help others review their work easily.

I think it should be www.wikipedia.nl www.wikipedia.be www.wikipedia.pt www.wikipedia.eo (uuups) The longer we wait to get these domains, the more we will have to deal with domain grabbers. Which domains besides .com, .org and .de do we (Jimmy) already own? Kurt

Giskart wrote: Another possibility is to have: http://www.wikipedia.org/ http://www.wikipedia.com/ http://wikipedia.org/ http://wikipedia.com/ merely be a static page that links to the various languages, while: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/* http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/* http://wikipedia.com/wiki/* http://wikipedia.org/wiki/* would go to the English to preserve existing links, while the canonical urls for such would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/* Unless you'd prefer to move the meta wiki into the www.wikipedia.org place and declare it to be multilingual. (Shudder) -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Giskart wrote: Google is now starting to find wikipedia at the new location www.wikipedia.org = 18 www.wikipedia.com = 1360 Time is up. giskart