At 2002-10-16 18:44 -0700, Stephen Gilbert wrote:
--- Brion VIBBER <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
It was suggested in the first place because many
people (including
Cunctator) are begging for the abilities to:
* Have a single username and login for the
encyclopedia in all languages
and meta
* View things like Recentchanges for the
encyclopedia in multiple
languages and/or meta combined.
These demand a single server.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)
They also demand input from the other language wikis.
We'll have a lot of unhappy people if we take a vote
on this list, then move the wikis to
www.wikipedia.org/xx/.
The support expressed from the other wikis was to move
the English Wikipedia to
en.wikipedia.org, which is a
different matter: the change only affects the English
wiki.
What we are arguing about is a flaw in the design
of URL's:
The basic format
http://www.site.com/path0/path1
should have been:
http://com/site/www/path0/path1
How it is organized server-wise doesn't matter to
the user. By the way, everyone can easily see that
'www' is redundant in this notation. 'com' versus
'org' etc. also doesn't make much sense, because
there is no 'ibm.org', 'ibm' is always 'ibm.com'.
But as things are now, I think 'mav'-s suggestions
make a lot of sense. I think the www should be added
in all cases, so you can leave 'http://' out.
As regards centralizing the whole system on one
server, I have mixed feelings: On the one hand,
I believe that individual language sites should
be able to be independent, but who would benefit?
The users or the ego's of the developers? I guess
the latter. On the other hand: One big project
(which has many advantages) might collapse at a
certain point, whilst a decentralized approach
might offer more chances of survival.
As it stands I tend to lean towards keeping it
all central. Bandwidth-wise this isn't a real
problem as long as the central server is inside
of the USA. Most providers outside of the USA
buy 50% local bandwidth and 50% bandwidth to
the USA.
Keeping the stuff central also means that most
things will be the same on all language variations
of the site, which benefits the user. I see no
reason why some of the sites would use a green
color to indicate articles that don't exist yet
and others still use a '?' behind the link.
I'd also like to have to log-in only once for
all sites.
As regards the entry-page which looses 20-40%
viewers. I think, it's a valid point. I am not
opposed to
www.wikipedia.org being the entrance
to the English version, but treating all languages
the same also has it's charms.
I have been searching the Netscape site for a while
earlier today, because I seemed to remember that
it had some sort of solution for the language problem.
I think that one could write several files like
index.html.en
index.html.de
index.html.nl
and in your browser you (as a client) could give
a sequence of prefered languages and even when just
asking for index.html you would get it in the language
that you liked best. Of course I hate intelligent
systems that make (usually wrong) decessions for
me. I don't have a prefered language that I want
to read everything in. When the orginal language
is German and the translations are bad I prefer
to read the original German text, the same goes
for English and Dutch. But in case of French and
Italian etc. I prefer a bad translation over the
original.
Ah, and back again about the server issue: I don't
see why
http://www.nl.wikipedia.org/ can more easily
be on a server in another country than
http://www.wikipedia.org/nl/. I tend to assume that
these redirection issues have already been solved.
I tend to like the second format better, but somehow
I don't really feel comfortable with the language
being coded into the path. I don't know why. I'll
program myself to dream about this problem tonight...
Greetings,
Jaap