[Intlwiki-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] en.wikipedia.org vs www.wikipedia.org and the Wikipedia family

[The Cunctator]

On Fri, 2002-10-11 at 12:25, Anthere wrote:
> 
> > 1)There's a need for a portal page stating the existence of all the wikis,
> > a few infos about each, and a direct link to each. This page should be
> > at wikipedia.org.
> 
> Unfortunately, the portal page is just about the most bankrupt concept
> possible in terms of usability, and online, usability is just about all
> you've got. The harm of adding one more click to users, both new and
> old, is measurable and huge.
> 
> One more click *only once* does not look like *huge* to me. Only once.
> And one more login *only once* even less.

If you take a look at  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3APopularpages

you see the problem of the extra click. The front page has more than 20
times as many view as the next most popular pages. Clickthroughs
generally follow [[Zipf's law]] (it's even used as an example!).

> >www.wikipedia.org already has all the portalness it needs in its two
> >paragraphs of intro. The article count should probably count all the
> >languages, but that's about it.
> 
> 
> Maybe there is a confusion here. Right now, the www.wikipedia.org is the english wikipedia.
>  Right now, on the actual www.wikipedia.org, there is *little way* a user not fluent in english, will have the idea to scroll and look everywhere, down to the bottom of the page, inside a crowded list of international links, to find the link to a latin wikipedia.
> Right now, the www.wikipedia.org introduction text is entirely in english.

Yes. The other language links need to be in their own languages, not in
the English versions of the languages. Jimmy: the translations are on
the bottom of the home page.

I've added the rest of the languages up top. 

> 
> >Right now the different language versions of WP are separate wikis; that
> >should not be the permanent case. And that is what should be focused on
> >here.
> 
> 
> I would personnaly highly prefer interlinguage links are improved, before any portal page.

I agree.