Hello,

just a quick and dirty design study for www.wikipedia.org (not all links are working, some text isn't translated yet and no colors are defined)

http://www.djini.de/Uploads/wikipedia/wikipedia.html

(tested on IE (Mac), Mozilla, lynx, links, iCab and Omniweb)

Maybe after Cunctator could be convinced that no old links will be broken we can progress a little bit in this affair.

Comments, critics, other drafts and so on welcome, greetings, elian

I like it, I like it a lot. IMO the logo should be centered with the text (meaning it needs to go up more) and I also think the search engine should have a link to "advanced options" (so that a person could select which languages to search and which namespaces - the default should be to search all languages in the article namespace -- this would exclude Metapedia). But then, we won't be able to do this type of search until/if we have a multilingual Phase IV wiki where all the languages are on the same wiki (as previously explained in some detail). A combined database would also be needed for your Log in link to work as expected (meaning for the whole Wikipedia). But your proposal greatly improves upon mine in that you devised a way to naturally have /direct/ links to each of the different language's Recent Changes and Main Pages -- kudos! I still think we should wait for a multilingual Phase IV before we implement a multilingual Welcome Page for the whole project, however.

One thing that was in my proposal that isn't in yours are links to different welcome pages in several different languages (Willkomen / Bienvenue / Welcome / Bonvenon / Bienvenidos / Bienvenidos / Boa vinda ... ). In spite of the attitude that some Americans exhibit, not everybody can read or even *gasp* ever wants to be able to read English.

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. It would also be neat to be able to set your user preferences to bypass the multilingual Welcome Page or to over-ride the language sniffing and go directly to your language of choice (but typing xx.wikipedia.org or clicking on a different welcome page isn't that hard so this isn't too important).

I will go into greater detail at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org on Friday.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site http://webhosting.yahoo.com/