[Intlwiki-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org design

[Paul Ebermann]

"elian" skribis:

> Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> > I personally think it would then be neat for
> > www.wikipedia.org to sniff the language setting of a
> > visitor's browser and then automatically direct them
> > to their language's welcome page if it exists -- if it
> > doesn't then it would bring them to the English
> > welcome page. I don't think that matching the language
> > a person's browser is in with a welcome page in the
> > same language is going to harm the user when several
> > other welcome pages in different languages are just a
> > click away. If this sniffing is done then all the
> > different languages can equally use www.wikipedia.org
> > for promotional purposes without having to explain why
> > the default is in English and how to get to their
> > language's welcome page. 
> 
> Although I normally oppose browser-sniffing, one solution would be to make
> the welcome-text (and only this) language-dependent. Either this or in
> addition to it we could also adapt Magnus' suggestion to emphasize the
> preferred language-wikipedia.

What do you think about a design like the one
at www.esperanto.net?

A _very_ short greeting message in your language
(in our case maybe a bit longer) then a list of
the supported languages, with your own language
highlighted.

Not to forget: When doing language-switching and
the preferred language is not available, try the
next ones from the list before falling back to
english. (There are webpages giving me english
instead of german since german is at place 2,
Esperanto at place 1.)

Paul