On 10/27/02 11:13 PM, "Tom Parmenter" <tompar(a)world.std.com> wrote:
For my sins I spent many years as a minor manager and learned very
little, but I did learn the following:
Every decision has a down side. If there were no cost to making
a decision, there would be no difficulty in making it. Indeed,
there would be no decison to make.
In the present case of an opening page:
-- Multilingual page -- builds and advertises the multilingual
wikipedia at the cost of distracting and possibly driving away
readers with a limited-content page, mostly in languages they don't
speak (et cetera)
-- Automatic redirect to language setting of browser -- takes the
reader where they probably want to go at the cost of annoying them
with our arrogance if that isn't what they want (et cetera)
No amount of discussion can make either of these costs go away. I
would rather pay the second cost. Other people would rather pay the
first.
Well spoken. Of course, one should take into account that drawbacks of
implementations can often be reduced or eliminated by redrawing the problem
space.
In other words, if you can change the problem, new solutions become
possible.