On lun, 2003-02-17 at 03:30, Daniel Mayer wrote:

IIRC Jimbo was dead set against this type of move (but redirection from a county domain to the .org one is fine). IMO it is bad enough already that xx.wikipedia.org looks like a different domain.

I thought we were all one big project at one domain on one server - having different domains will only tend to enforce a sense of separateness.

Compare: http://google.com/ http://google.fr/ http://google.pl/ etc. Do you think they are separate organizations? The Wikipedia name is much more unifying and significant than the .org / .com / .pl / whatever.

The most important thing is that we're all working to create an open, free encyclopedia, using the GFDL license that enables us to share and share alike. It's really pretty frickin' irrelevant what the domain name is, much less the top-level domain.

Disadvantages of putting everything under wikipedia.org include:

* .org is exotic and unfamiliar to many potential users; a country domain is more familiar and comfortable (and recognizable as a web address!) and will have more local flavor.

* Some search engines limit to the local country's top-level domain (possibly meant as a crude language filter; if 90% of your users are middle-aged housewives who don't speak anything but Foobarian there's little reason to return results outside of the .foo domain; the outside world is another market that bigger search engines like google have wrapped up), and may not index .org. Having a secondary redirect domain doesn't really help here, as 99% of links will be to the canonical URL, and a redirect may not get indexed at all.

Disadvantages of putting languages preferentially under national domains include:

* Many people have asked for a unified login system so you don't have to login separately in each language. Using different top-level domains will greatly limit the usefulness of this once it's put in place; even if usernames and passwords are synchronized, login cookies will be separate for each domain and you'll have to login separately (at least once per domain if you tell it to save your password, otherwise on every visit).

* Many languages are not easily associated with countries, and many countries are not clearly associated with a single language. (www.wikipedia.be directs to a page where you can choose French, Dutch, or Frisian; meanwhile there is no TLD for Esperanto.) Further, in many cases there are mismatches between language codes and country codes -- .my is Malaysia, but my is the language code for Burmese; .uk is the United Kingdom, but uk is the language code for Ukrainian (TLD .ua). Inconsistency between naming and linking will lead to increased confusion.

However I'm generally willing to let in a little confusion here to get rid of more confusion there; for instance the wikis for several European languages are set to display European standard time by default rather than UTC, since _most_ of their users are in a single time zone. I'd rather it were in UTC, but hey big deal! The overwhelming bulk of users can better decide what they want than I; my own personal settings can change the default timezone to my heart's content, but the default should be whatever's most appropriate for most people.

Also what happens if the owner of the domain doesn't or can't pay the bill for it or decides to yank it (not that I think Kpjas would ever do that)? If something does happen then a lot of links will be broken and I thought that was something that was greatly frowned upon around here.

Well, mav, what happens to Wiktionary if you were to forget to pay the bill for or decide to yank the plug on wiktionary.org?

If the foundation happens, I like to think that the various domains would be donated to it. (I know you've said you'd do that for wiktionary.org.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)