"elian" skribis:

Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com writes:

...

I personally think it would then be neat for www.wikipedia.org to sniff the language setting of a visitor's browser and then automatically direct them to their language's welcome page if it exists -- if it doesn't then it would bring them to the English welcome page. I don't think that matching the language a person's browser is in with a welcome page in the same language is going to harm the user when several other welcome pages in different languages are just a click away. If this sniffing is done then all the different languages can equally use www.wikipedia.org for promotional purposes without having to explain why the default is in English and how to get to their language's welcome page.

Although I normally oppose browser-sniffing, one solution would be to make the welcome-text (and only this) language-dependent. Either this or in addition to it we could also adapt Magnus' suggestion to emphasize the preferred language-wikipedia.

What do you think about a design like the one at www.esperanto.net?

A _very_ short greeting message in your language (in our case maybe a bit longer) then a list of the supported languages, with your own language highlighted.

Not to forget: When doing language-switching and the preferred language is not available, try the next ones from the list before falling back to english. (There are webpages giving me english instead of german since german is at place 2, Esperanto at place 1.)

Paul