On Fri, 2002-12-06 at 10:55, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

Why do you want all projects to share the same user database?

1) Common user database: single account/login for all languages and meta, saving a lot of trouble for a lot of people

2) Common file upload area: don't have to copy 200 flag images over to X wiki because they were put in an English-only section; they'll be available to all

3) Common link database: *Much* easier to track interlanguage links (and image files linked to from articles in the various languages), including detection of nonexistent articles and automatic backlinking to the other languages, even for articles that don't exist in the current language but are linked to from others (eg, "no article on this topic is yet available in Florthapian ([[create one now!]]), but it's available in [[Upper Wuvian]] and [[Quenya]]")

4) As the number of languages running on the new server as separate wikis increases, maintenance gets more difficult.

Please comment at: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)