On 10/24/02 3:00 PM, "Toby Bartels" &lt;toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu&gt; wrote: <snip> Note: the current page says "Welcome to Wikipedia, a collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in every language." Elian's page says something similar to the above, but also says: "Below you will find welcome messages and links to each of our active Wikipedia language projects." I challenge you to demonstrate that it is not the case that the above sentence promotes the view that Wikipedia is a coalition of largely distinct projects, balkanized by language. <snip> We do this first, and I'll be happy. I've been suggesting this long before mav had. But I'm glad he agrees with me.

The Cunctator wrote: But has no prominent links to any language other than English. The proof was mentioned by you already; it says at the very top "Wikipedia is an international, multilingual collaborative project "whose goal is to produce an interlinked open content, neutral and "complete encyclopedia from scratch in every language. Therefore it is not a coalition of largely distinct projects. Ipso facto, the projects mentioned later must be subprojects; that is the only logical conclusion (and clearly what elian intended too). But yeah, the current wording towards the bottom could be approved. It should just say something like "each of our active languages", or at the very least say "subprojects" instead of "projects". What I really don't understand about your objections is your argument that an international home page is balkanising. I mean, I totally cannot process this claim. I'm not entirely pleased with the look of elian's proposal, but it's axiomatic that the purpose is language integration. Actually, I guess that it doesn't have a link to integrated Recentchanges, just a link to integrated searching (which currently goes to [[en:]] since integrated searching is not in actuality supported). But it *should* have a link to integrated Recentchanges, so we do still need to code this. Yes, I thought that you would agree with this. An integrated main page would not IMO *hurt* the project now, but it would do a much better job of *helping* the project under PediaWiki 4.0. Unfortunately, you, mav, and I don't know PHP, so we can only say what we would like to happen while working on proposals for interlinguistic main pages. -- Toby

--- elian &lt;elian(a)gmx.li&gt; wrote: Hi, Your page is including some good stuff. It is presenting langage and other wikipedias in a balanced way. Imho, it is just missing others very important features. I think it is oriented toward a writer point of view, not toward a reader point of view. - a writer (i.e., a wikipedian) is interested by 1)choosing his/her langage and 2)access to recent changes. 3)watch list (if log recognised) 1 and 2 are available in your proposition. Though in case of 2, I think I understood Interlanguage recent changes will *not* be available until phase IV, so are hardly of any usefulness right now. 3 is not available. - a reader (i.e., anybody) is interested by 1) choosing his/her langage (for understanding) 3) multilingual search function (for punctual needs) 2) information/content (to be hooked, to get started) 4) access to main sections (for aimless wandering) 3 and 4 are missing. I believe it a problem. Some say that page must be bare, straightforward, minimalist. Well, I think a minimalist page is missing the point. Wikipedia is by definition a very lively, swarming, bushy place. A minimalist page is just a misrepresentation of what Wikipedia concept is. And it is booooooring. We don't only want a magnificent page, we also want a useful one. I don't think it is entirely useful for a reader here. Reader/writer On international wikipedias, what we want to favor now are writers, because that is what we need, and our encyclopedias are not interesting/reliable/comprehensive enough yet. On the en.wikipedia, the content is beginning to be consequent. It is usefull for a reader. The en.wiki must support its writers for sure, but also the readers for it is the final goal of an encyclopedia I believe. The writers know perfectly well where to go, they won't go throught www.wikipedia.org. On the en.wiki, I am much much more a "reader" than a "writer" for obvious linguistic reasons. I basically never go to recent changes (I am sure some will find that unbelievable :-)), the basic reasons being 1) my weeding job, I already do on the fr.wiki 2) loading time is a pain (hum, categories ?) 3) it seems each time I go there, 90% of the lines are from RamMan. This is similar to special:newpages, which I gave up looking at. And, well, as Tarquin said, these are uninteresting to me, and hiding other interesting pages in the mass. In short, as a reader, I don't go to recentchanges. I wander from the actualities, I wander from some of the main categories, to tunnel deeper down. As a reader/occasional writer, I use the watch list on what is of interest to me. Now, my questions are - are we making the www.wikipedia.org for *readers* or for *writers* ? - how much are readers expected to be occcasional writers ? - how can we solve scaling issues ? When recentchanges are multilanguages, I don't think all changes should be displayed, even in a two languages choice. If a bilingual french/english find his changes made of 90% of RamMan entries in his list, he will quickly set back an entirely french recentchanges. This must be thought of. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site http://webhosting.yahoo.com/

I'm not the person being asked, but I think there's a simple solution: www.wikipedia.org should do an HTTP redirect to en.wikipedia.org, de.wikipedia.org or whatever based on the language preference in the browser. If someone who has German in their browser then wants to work on the English WP, they just click on the "English" link on the top, or go to en.wikipedia.org next time instead of www.wikipedia.org. But in general, no language would be preferred, and the browser settings would be honored instead. Is there any problem with that? I strongly agree with Cunctator and others that a static, language-"neutral" frontpage is a very, very bad idea, esp. from a usability perspective. Best regards, Erik Moeller

On 10/25/02 11:41 AM, "Stephen Gilbert" &lt;canuck_in_korea2002(a)yahoo.com&gt; wrote: <browser localization redirect> Summary of the text below: "Fine with me, as long as 'www.wikipedia.org' doesn't redirect to 'en.wikipedia.org'." 1) There doesn't seem to be any major philosophical objection to a browser localization redirect of "http://www.wikipedia.org/". I only see a secondary philosophical objection. The objection is based on the argument that first people should be encouraged to contribute to the Eng-lang Wikipedia before others, not from the principle that English is better, but from the principle that "from a strict efficiency point of view, the goal of a comprehensive and neutral encyclopedia would benefit from dealing with issues in only one central article with as many actors as possible debating/working together rather than several different articles with only a couple of persons in each place, even though they are updating their own articles from the other wikis", as Anthere eloquently put it. (I'm not claiming she advocates this position. She just described it well.) This objection would be pretty much obviated with better backend integration and interlanguage tools. It's not a major objection, especially since the plan is to integrate the backend. 2) I would very much like to see a test implementation of this before it gets put on the live site. 3) If this could be implemented without redirecting English to "en.wikipedia.org" (thus introducing a new URL schema) that would be good, until or unless all the consequences of a new URL schema are worked out.

The Cunctator &lt;cunctator(a)kband.com&gt; writes: I have nine browsers on my computer (needed for webdesign and some other purposes). Some don't even have a localize-option and do you think I bother to configure the rest? So I get english all the time. My mother doesn't even know that her browser has a localize-option and she doesn't speak english and - yes, she thinks also that webadresses always start with www. However, she would be a great contributor to the German wikipedia. Have you ever watched non-computer experienced people using their computer? Just ask how many know their browser preferences. Esperanto is not available as language option in all of my browsers. De facto, by depending only on browser settings, we would deprive the Esperanto wikipedia of many possible contributors (who would be enthusiastic discovering an esperanto encyclopedia but have no interest at all in contributing to yet another english encyclopedia) Next, I want to see the progress of all wikipedias at one central place and not somewhere hidden at an obscure statistics page somewhere at the english (Main?) wikipedia where nobody of the non-english contributors bothers to look for regularly. The version I proposed stimulates competition. Lastly, I want to have a simple, not crowded page to search wikipedia where I am not disturbed by masses of text and I have to look very sharply to discover the small "search" field in one corner. If we want to be an encyclopedia, we should offer people an attractive interface for quick and easy searching wikipedia - and where could this be better placed than on the Main Page www.wikipedia.org? If I am somewhere and I simply want to know something, I don't want categories, introductions and masses of links: I want a search box, cursor already placed in it, type in something and get my results. If this is the case I vote for abandoning the other language wikipedias, but I am not sure if I understood you right: you build sentences of German length. Besides, I am no philosopher, my objections are not philosophical but practical. If you like to engage in philosophical discussions I suggest a philosophy forum, not wikipedia-mailinglist. We have one thing in common: we both object balcanization, however our interpretation seem to vary. I think a wikipedia, each language on a separate URL without a centralized - and a really centralized - main page is a bundle of balkanized projects. If this remains like this, I prefer to stay in the nice, peaceful, balkanized German wikipedia without having to think about the others around - at least we have www.wikipedia.de. Maybe the dutch, the french, the polish and so on could also reserve .nl, .fr, .pl... greetings, elian -- "Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pacman affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music." ~unknown

Toby Bartels &lt;toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu&gt; writes: Not the right wording, you are right. What I meant is both, cooperation and competition. It ranges from "Oh, the spanish have 4000 articles now - I should go over and add interlanguage links" and "hello, the french added in one week over 1000 articles - how did they do that? Let's have a look..." to "Oh, no - the x-ish are outrunning us, let's try to get some more contributors." greetings, elian -- Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees. - Terry Pratchett

Anthere wrote: "We are already working on 3127159 articles." Hey, that'll beat Britannica any day! ^_^ -- Toby

Erik Moeller &lt;erik_moeller(a)gmx.de&gt; writes: The big deal is: Do you see Wikipedia as a bunch of separate language projects which don't need a common frontpage or do you see it as a multilingual united project? This is currently being done by Magnus. The new draft checks language settings equally and prints the welcome message in the prefered language. with the difference that it is still one page for all wikipedias and not the redirected Polish with links to some others. If you are a company wanting to satisfy your customers, this makes perfect sense. However I don't see Wikipedia as a company, I see it as something like an international organization and international organizations, see UN, EU, Vatican etc., don't use automatic redirects - and they don't seem to loose visitors because of this. and the lack of one common frontpage where all languages are equally and prominently represented. No. The embassies are as dead as they can be. The Spanish didn't rejoin and after this discussion I can perfectly understand their feelings. what keeps you from bookmarking your language wikipedia? You don't have to start at the frontpage. What is so terribly wrong in showing prominently that we are a multilingual project instead of forcing a visitor directly in his presumed favorite language wikipedia without showing him that there is more to the project than the handful of articles in his language? It's a questions of priorities. If you don't value true internationality, keep it like it is. An automatic redirect doesn't change one jota of the current situation of separate projects linked together by "other languages". greetings, elian -- I possess a fortuitous surplus of the three chief virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris - Larry Wall

Axel Boldt &lt;axelboldt(a)yahoo.com&gt; writes: I am in complete agreement with Axel. -- Gareth Owen "Wikipedia does rock. By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)