[Wikipedia-l] Re: Portals, flags, chaos

[Stephen Forrest]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 22:55:35 +0100, Paweł 'Ausir' Dembowski
<fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
> PP> www.wikipedia.org ends up as not particularly useful to anyone, and hard
> PP> to make non-ugly. Thus not much of a benefit, and we have to weigh
> PP> against the "broken" links to www.wikipedia.org that have built up over
> PP> the years.
> 
> Unlike Amazon, other languages are not just foreign divisions of the American
> company, but Wikipedia is an attempt at making a real multilanguage
> encyclopedia. Are you saying that Wikipedia should be US-centric?

Wikipedia ought not be US-centric, or English-centric.  In the short
term, however, it benefits Wikipedia to be useful to people who wish
to use it, and I would suspect there are still more of these
interested in en: than any other language.  There will be considerable
numbers of casual readers who will be deterred by having to make any
choice on language, however trivial.

At the very least, the current portal could be changed to say "Select
your preferred language" or some such thing.  I suspect there are many
English speakers who would not even recognize the list currently on
www.wikipedia.org as a list of languages.  People who have no exposure
to languages beyond their own can have a very low tolerance for
reading foreign words before flinging up their hands in exasperation.

(Even here in Canada, an English-speaking country that is more
bilingual than most, I have known people who have become confused,
irritated, or even enraged at hearing "for English, press one" on
voicemail systems.)

For a larger solution: I suggest we seriously consider the idea of
auto-forwarding based on some combination of user location or browser
language settings.  Of course, a user must be able to override this.

Steve