[WikiEN-l] Moving the Main Page

[Andrew Gray]

On 14/01/07, Christopher Thieme <cdthieme at gmail.com> wrote:

> As to other links in print sources.  Whoever wrote up marketing materials
> with " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page " on it should be dragged into
> the street and shot, or at least fired because anyone in ad copy will tell
> you to state shorter URLs on such materials, or your target audience won't
> find it or (worse) they'll ignore it.  Heck, I type en.wikipedia.org each
> time I get to Wikipedia, but I'm not most people.  Most people don't think
> when looking at or responding to ads, written materials, etc.  Any smart
> marketing/adcopy person would have told you to get put together materials
> saying " www.wikipedia.com "
>
> Jimbo, if that's the case, fire the marketing department.

This isn't "the marketing department". It's the public. The one
academic article I can remember offhand - in the Journal of American
History - which deals with us does indeed, footnote ".../Main_Page".
It's all the newspaper stories which talk about us and give the
mainpage URL at the end. It's the thousands, tens of thousands, of
people who link into us from the rest of the web, and dutifully - and
sensibly - do so to the URL we give as our front page. We have all
these things pointing to "Main_Page". None of them are going to go
away. There is no pressing reason to move the page; so why do it?

There is nothing to me that seems more futile than making a vast fuss
about changing something to fit into an arbitrary scheme which we
ourself chose to impose. We wrote these rules. We are perfectly
capable of exercising our common sense in choosing when they apply.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk