Timwi wrote in part:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
There's no reason why one language's Wikipedia should do something one way just because some other language's does it so.
Why? The only reason Wikipedia exists in several languages is to make it accessible to speakers of other languages, not to create different content based on a certain audience. Ideally, the actual contents of the Wikipedias should be the same, only in different languages.
Ideally, yes. Ideally, Wikipedia should be available in all languages, with complete versions on all topics of human knowledge. None of this is going to happen in /my/ lifetime. One language's version of Wikipedia, while it develops, shouldn't force the development of another language's version, even though both are approaching the goal of complete coverage. At least not until there's sound auto-translation software, because humans aren't going to be willing to do the work.
In particular, the set of covered topics (read: article titles) should be the same, because the set of expressible topics as well as the importance or relevance of each topic do *not* depend on language.
And if it isn't -- what then? (Meaning forever, what then.) Tomasz's plan for automatic interlanguage links, whatever its flaws, at least addresses this possibility. Your plan, however, won't allow certain links to be written at all until the discrepancy between the wikis' organisation is sorted out.
Interlanguage links are the /first/ step on the road to helping each language's version contain all the info that each other language's version has -- it can't be held hostage to article organisation, which on [[en:]] at least is rearranged often. (Not to mention that it depends on [[en:]]'s naming conventions, which themselves rely heavily on the /English/ language.)
-- Toby