Cunc, as I understand it, you have three points to your argument:
1. it's a disruption 2. it's a minor fix to a larger problem 3. why should the largest wikipedia have to move anyway?
1 has been adressed earlier. we've moved domain name before. 2 -- yes, I agree. The problem is larger than this. But this is a significant move. Like mav said, it's *symbolic*. it's not the solution, but it's part of it. It shows that the other languages are siblings -- younger siblings, yes, -- but not subordinates.
I fear I cannot answer point 3. I seems to me to stem from a fundamentally different view of life. But I trust that should the German Wikipedia ever grow larger than the English, you will be in favour of it acquiring the coveted www. domain, with the English being demoted to en: ?
Anyway, if we're talking numbers, we should save www. for the Chinese Wikipedia ;-)
An older post of yours says:
More effort should be put into building the cross-link capabilities,
perhaps with some automatic dictionary translations.
Yes. But please please please can we drop this idea of "automatic dictionary translations". Try it sometime. Computers cannot translate.
The Cunctator wrote:
On Fri, 2002-10-11 at 04:00, Daniel Mayer wrote:
On Friday 11 October 2002 12:40 am, The Cunctato wrote:
On 10/10/02 6:41 PM, "Daniel Mayer" maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
<snip>
Granted the English Wikipedia is the oldest and largest but it shouldn't be vaulted as /The Main/ Wikipedia with the other languages relegated to second class status in The Main WIkipedia's shadow.
By the same token, the English-lang Wikipedia is the oldest and largest (by far), and it shouldn't be shoved around simply for the sake of political correctness.
? How is finally having the English Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org shoving around the English Wikipedia? All the others are at xx.wikipedia.org so this isn't about political correctness, it is about what is fair and equal.
By writing "finally having" you imply inevitability. That certainly isn't the case. One could also write "How is redirecting the overwhelming preponderance of all Wikipedia entries shoving around the English Wikipedia? A small percentage of entries are at xx.wikipedia.org so this isn't about political correctness, it is about what is fair and equal (where equality means having every language group be given equivalent URLs, even though that concept of equality ignores the gross differences in the representation of the groups)."
By definition doing "what is fair and equal" for groups with unequal representation is being politically correct. The Wikipedia entry [[political correctness]] is pretty good.
Some acts of political correctness are good and necessary; but many aim to solve important problems with surface changes, and this proposed act is largely the latter.
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