Timwi wrote: As much as I support the idea of a unified log-in and account, I would be hesitant about having a unified database. Of course any attempt to unify databases should not take place until all projects, including the English Wikipedia have been converted to Unicode. I prefer to look at the watch lists separately, because each project tends to approach things differently. Some people would indeed like to have combined watchlists, and they should have that option, but it should not be the default for everybody. We should also be able to have different preferences. I use different combinations of side-bars and skins as a way of knowing which project I happen to be in at any given time. Ec

T> Well, I have already mentioned several times in the past that, T> in the medium term, we should merge all the Wikipedias, or T> perhaps even all the Wikimedia projects, into one database, so T> that users can have *ONE* account, *ONE* watchlist and *ONE* T> set of preferences. I agree. It also allows better author tracking for translations between versions of a page, and would make maintenance a whole lot easier. (I've only got three DBs to maintain, and that's a pain in the butt already.) It'd also make sharing images and such much easier. I think there are a number of issues: 1) Marking articles with a language code. That's pretty straightforward, I think: add another column for the language code. 2) Linking multiple articles that deal with the same subject but differ only by language. I think the current ILL mechanism works OK for now. At some point it might be good to reify this in the database, though. 3) User interface language. I believe this can be determined from the browser headers, and we could have an override set in a cookie or a user preference. 4) Choosing which version of an article to show. This is easy if the there's a version in the user's language 5) Namespaces. The namespaces are translated internally to numbers, so this shouldn't be a big, big hassle, but there's some hairiness. 6) Cultures. This is the really hard one. It'd be difficult to integrate the N Wikipedias into one. It's hard to do decision-making in multiple languages. I think making the user's UI language and the language of the currently displayed article _orthogonal_ is the key here. A Norwegian speaker reading a French article should see the article text in French, but the UI navitorial ("Edit this page") in Norwegian (or whatever language they choose). Anyways, this should probably get pushed to meta.w.o. ~ESP -- Evan Prodromou <evan(a)wikitravel.org> Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/ The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide

Timwi wrote: Let me add *ONE* notification of "You have new messages". Ro -- Rob W.W. Hooft || rob(a)hooft.net || http://www.hooft.net/people/rob/