[WikiEN-l] Portals, flags, chaos

[Sj]

A global portal is a fine idea; has been for many moons.  But why in
the world did this change happen with such little notice?

I've been largely offline for the past week, and didn't see the
initial conversation;  afaict the idea of a portal seems to have gone
from suggestion on wikipedia-l to reality in the span of a day,
without notice on the en wikipedia.

It was not at all urgent, and the sudden change breaks the usability
of existing links and shortcuts [though I'd heard a portal was being
set up, this is how I found out just now that the portal is still
English-centric, hard to navigate, and slow to load].

I wish everyone had waited to implement this until the portal were
more usable and better announced, and redirection policy better
discussed.  But perhaps noone else noticed...

+sj+   

(For instance, I think anyone coming form a US or UK IP with
browser-lang set to English should still get redirected to the en:
main page, perhaps with a visible line atop the current page-layout
with links to the portal and a language dropdown... this will help a
vast # of visitors who hit [www.]wikipedia.org)