I think some of the main disagreements regarding the portal page stem from disagreements and misunderstandings of its purpose.

Some (myself, sj) believe it should be short and simple, with the sole purpose of directing users quickly to their intended destination.

Others (GeorgeStepanek, David Gerard) believe it should be our "front page", Mr Stepanek even advocating a Featured Article template for each of the top 4 Wikipedias, Mr Gerard suggesting a logo including the logo text in hexilingual fashion.

In the end nearly all the stylistic disagreements come down to one question: What is the portal page? What is its purpose?

Before we can find a solution that is satisfactory to most parties involved (ie, not just users from the en.villagepump and a couple of others), we need to reach a consensus as to what exactly this portal is.

My opinion is: The problem (and reason people think it is our frontpage or that it should be) is that people continue to circulate wikipedia.org as the URL for "Wikipedia", rather than using the proper language-specific URLs based on the language medium in which you are advertising. The only people who end up at wikipedia.org /should/ be those who guess the URL, or those who pressed "I'm feeling lucky" at Google (even that may lead to en:). The lack of popular distinction among English speakers between Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia is an issue, but it should not concern us when deciding whether we need a frontpage, or a portal. We have used language-specific domains (and until recently have redirected visibly to the en subdomain from the wikipedia.org domain) for long enough now that if they still don't know, they should be patient enough to look through the top six languages to find English, which is featured very prominently (yet some people still complain on en: - boo hoo!)

Mark