Walter Vermeir wrote:
I asked myself that same question many years ago. I think I posted the first question about this on some wikipedia list at the end of 2001. Always a lot of objections. It would break links, English is the lingo franca of the internet. At the time of the change from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org used to a opportunity to do it but it has not be done.
Never from me. I think an international portal is a fantastic idea.
There are some challenges as to what that main page should look like, but I think we have a very very good mechanism for evolving the look of such a site: wiki.
http://wikimedia.org/ch-portal/ http://fds.wikipedia.org/ http://europa.eu.int/
It even does not have to look nice. Look how ugly http://www.wikimedia.org is.
I think it should look nice, but I think if we have it be a wiki page, it will evolve sensibly.
It does not make any sense for us to feature all 200 languages equally on this critical "first impression" page. It doesn't make sense for us to accept an ugly page. So, there is a design challenge, but I think we are up to it.
I think the main thing is, we have to do it.
--Jimbo