[Foundation-l] The problem with Incubator: An interactive journey

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 20:08, Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Thomas Goldammer <thogol at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> That'd be great, indeed. But if there is an article in enwiki about
>> that language, there is always also a link to the project(s), even if
>> it is in the incubator, example:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afar_language (it's near the bottom and
>> on the right edge, though, so one might not see it easily). Maybe one
>> could convince the communities to have such a link in other
>> wikipediae, too...
>
> I was just going to bring that up too. :-)
>
> It's obviously not a perfect solution, but it's likely that if someone
> were looking for a Wikipedia in their language, they'd probably type
> it into Google. So if we type in "Central Morocco Tamazight
> wikipedia", we get a link to
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Atlas_Tamazight> in the first
> result. They read more about what the article has to say, and then
> they see the link at the bottom and click on it. Much fewer steps, and
> at least a bit clearer/more logical.
>
> (This is actually what we do with many of the languages, at least on
> enwiki. See French for example:
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language#External_links>.)

Yep. All those ideas are inside of the project on which Robins works:
* xyz.wikipedia.org will be redirect for incubator.../wiki/wp/xyz
* All existing ISO 639-3 codes will get their pages "If you know this
language, please start to write Wikipedia." Although there would be
some limitations. For example, just if we are sure that the content is
written in particular language, it will get *full* redirects
(http://xyz.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Page =>
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/wp/xyz/Some_Page). Without that,
there will be just redirect to the main page.
* I was thinking to ask en.wp (and other Wikipedian) communities to
add a template similar to Incubator with note "If you know this
language you can start Wikipedia by following this link."

There are some problems with that; Robin told me that during
Wikimania. But, AFAIK, that's going to be changed during the next
months; likely up to the end of the year or so.

BTW, I repeated the first two points a couple of times on this list
since LangCom meeting in Berlin. And I am a bit surprised that we are
passing it again. (It wouldn't be an issue if there are newcomers who
wonders about it :P )

During the next week or so I'll present here what's happened on
Wikimania in relation to the languages.