[WikiEN-l] Portals, flags, chaos

[Nicholas Knight]

Sj wrote:
> 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?

This has been a subject of discussion for years. Decisions were made 
repeatedly and publicly that it should be done.

> 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.

Everyone should have been considering themselves on notice for years 
now. I wasn't even aware www.wikipedia.org WASN'T previously directing 
to a portal until people started complaining about this, that's how long 
it's been since I've gone to www.wikipedia.org. I thought this had 
already been taken care of ages ago.

> 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

It breaks no links or shortcuts that don't go explicitly to 
"http://www.wikipedia.org/". Anything UNDER www.wikipedia.org has been 
redirected to en.wikipedia.org for a long time now, and still is. And 
anyone that has bookmarked anything in that time has it bookmarked under 
en.wikipedia.org, because the redirection is explicit and the address 
the browser is using actually changes.

> 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 don't see any particularly avoidable english-centrism (we can't 
duplicate everything in every language, and English is essentially the 
lingua franca of academics and even the internet; much as I hate the 
language, it's presently the logical choice for certain things), nor do 
I see anything hard to navigate. If there's a problem, you can edit the 
portal yourself on meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wikipedia.org_portal

Knock yourself out.

As for "slow to load", that's a problem all Wikimedia sites are 
currently experiencing, and has nothing at all to do with the portal.

> 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...

Redirection policy was decided 2+ years ago and has already been 
implemented for a significant portion of that time. You never noticed 
that www.wikipedia.org/wiki/<anything> would redirect you to 
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<anything> ?

> +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)

Such detection is incredibly unreliable to the point that I've taken 
explicit steps in the past to assist automatic language detection 
mechanisms (widespread, pseudo-standard ones, mind you, not strange 
home-grown solutions) detect me as needing an English page and still 
wound up with pages in German or Russian or some other random language 
that I most assuredly do not speak despite the presence of an English 
version that the mechanism SHOULD have directed me to.