[Wikipedia-l] www.wikipedia.org (redirecting from www.wikipedia.org)

[Florian Schnadt]

Erik Moeller wrote:

> 1) Having the webserver automatically redirect the user to a Wikipedia in
> his language, based on the browser settings, is a much more transparent and
> obvious way of handling things. That's what, for example, Google and Debian do,
> both highly successful projects.

Redirecting gives at least two problems:

1) small language wikis

Redirecting to wikis without enough project ("meta") information or very few
articles might be a bad idea. There could be a link to an appropriate page on en
or meta and some explanation in a prominent place (at the top :) ) until this
changes.

2) outside links

Redirecting will break links if my browser doesn't use english language setting. A
somewhat dirty fix might be to check if this is an outside link and only redirect
if the page exists in the language wikipedia. Thus my german language setting will
take me to the english chemistry article if I click a link outside of
wikipedia.org (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry) but take me to the german
page on most (at least some ;) ) names, cities etc.


Sorry if this has all been written before, but I somehow lost track of this
discussion ;)

Flo