Mark-
Why the hell was this changed? Why was no one told
before hand, or even
afterward?
Making
www.wikipedia.org a multilingual portal has been suggested by many
different people ever since the creation of new languages besides English.
I point you, for example, to this summary by Elian written in October
2002, where a large number of people favored a multilingual portal:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/024522.html
The change from
www.wikipedia.org to
en.wikipedia.org was made in part to
accommodate any future mulitilingual portal, and if you browse around
Meta, you'll find several proposals for such a portal.
Not discriminating in favor of or against any particular widely spoken
language is an important part of Wikimedia's mission. The fact that
www.wikipedia.org redirected to the English Wikipedia has, for many, been
a long-standing violation of this principle.
Partially in response, the English Wikipedia has in the past spent
considerable energy on making the other languages more visible on the Main
Page. Now that
www.wikipedia.org is a portal, we can dare to make
en.wikipedia.org a little more English-centric.
Why has the creation of the portal taken so long? Mostly because nobody
wanted to make a decision about what the portal would look like. With
Tim's solution, which is editable through Meta, the community can work
this out over time.
Regards,
Erik