From what I remember from past "unofficial poll"
(http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org), most people did not think that having www.wikipedia.org as a multi-language portal would be stupid.
That's right, and as someone who advocates voting, I will tolerate a portal if it is supported by the majority opinion. However,
1) Having the webserver automatically redirect the user to a Wikipedia in his language, based on the browser settings, is a much more transparent and obvious way of handling things. That's what, for example, Google and Debian do, both highly successful projects.
2) Even if we use a portal, we need to first make sure that old links, e.g.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry
stay valid, or we will get huge problems with existing web and Usenet references, search indices etc.
3) If we use a portal, it should at least offer some additional features, such as a multi-language search and multi-language Recent Changes. This is not possible with the current software because all Wikipedias are separate.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
- Having the webserver automatically redirect the user to a Wikipedia in
his language, based on the browser settings, is a much more transparent and obvious way of handling things. That's what, for example, Google and Debian do, both highly successful projects.
Redirecting gives at least two problems:
1) small language wikis
Redirecting to wikis without enough project ("meta") information or very few articles might be a bad idea. There could be a link to an appropriate page on en or meta and some explanation in a prominent place (at the top :) ) until this changes.
2) outside links
Redirecting will break links if my browser doesn't use english language setting. A somewhat dirty fix might be to check if this is an outside link and only redirect if the page exists in the language wikipedia. Thus my german language setting will take me to the english chemistry article if I click a link outside of wikipedia.org (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry) but take me to the german page on most (at least some ;) ) names, cities etc.
Sorry if this has all been written before, but I somehow lost track of this discussion ;)
Flo
On ĵaŭ, 2003-01-23 at 07:55, Florian Schnadt wrote:
Redirecting gives at least two problems:
- small language wikis
Redirecting to wikis without enough project ("meta") information or very few articles might be a bad idea. There could be a link to an appropriate page on en or meta and some explanation in a prominent place (at the top :) ) until this changes.
True.
- outside links
Redirecting will break links if my browser doesn't use english language setting. A somewhat dirty fix might be to check if this is an outside link and only redirect if the page exists in the language wikipedia. Thus my german language setting will take me to the english chemistry article if I click a link outside of wikipedia.org (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry) but take me to the german page on most (at least some ;) ) names, cities etc.
As has been promised a number of times before, current canonical-form links to articles* will *never* be broken, to the best of our ability. (The main exceptions being if the project somehow loses control of the domain name, or if the present URI system is no longer used a few decades from now and no software supports it anymore. Or for _particular_ pages, if it is deleted completely or had a technically misformed title that must be removed instead of just redirected to avoid breaking things.)
* For English wikipedia, this means: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_title and the older: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Some_title will always continue to work, even if we change the canonical format they will redirect to the current location. (If a page is renamed on the wiki, we have redirects within the wiki system to get you there, even if you have an outdated link, bookmark, search engine query, or printed citation.) Other languages' old-form canonical links should be preserved as well; where they are not, this is an error and should be reported so we can correct it.
Proposed browser-sniffing redirection for languages would *only* be for direct access to http://www.wikipedia.org/ or http://wikipedia.org/ with no page name specfied, *never* within the wiki.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Chuck Smith wrote:
I know a lot of people who thought the Esperanto Wikipedia was the only language that existed in the project and I'd imagine that we're not alone in this.
Perhaps the solution to this little detail is that the Esperanto homepage needs to be internationalized in some way?
Can you give us more detail of exactly what you are proposing?
Do you propose removing the "tree" and "Selected articles" from www.wikipedia.org? Where should we put them?
Do you propose having the intro text, 2 sentences, in a whole bunch of languages?
Do you propose browser-detection? (Problematic for a number of reasons that many people have mentioned, but certainly a live possibility.)
--Jimbo
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