[WikiEN-l] www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to the en main page

[Erik Moeller]

Mark-
> Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told before hand, or even
> afterward?

Making www.wikipedia.org a multilingual portal has been suggested by many  
different people ever since the creation of new languages besides English.  
I point you, for example, to this summary by Elian written in October  
2002, where a large number of people favored a multilingual portal:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/024522.html

The change from www.wikipedia.org to en.wikipedia.org was made in part to  
accommodate any future mulitilingual portal, and if you browse around  
Meta, you'll find several proposals for such a portal.

Not discriminating in favor of or against any particular widely spoken  
language is an important part of Wikimedia's mission. The fact that  
www.wikipedia.org redirected to the English Wikipedia has, for many, been  
a long-standing violation of this principle.

Partially in response, the English Wikipedia has in the past spent  
considerable energy on making the other languages more visible on the Main  
Page. Now that www.wikipedia.org is a portal, we can dare to make  
en.wikipedia.org a little more English-centric.

Why has the creation of the portal taken so long? Mostly because nobody  
wanted to make a decision about what the portal would look like. With  
Tim's solution, which is editable through Meta, the community can work  
this out over time.

Regards,

Erik