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

Mon Jan 10 22:49:06 UTC 2005

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 22:55:35 +0100, Paweł 'Ausir' Dembowski
<fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
> 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?

This is a good point - sitting here in the UK, I frequently forget
that amazon.com will take me to the *US* site; perhaps if I was in
Germany, it would try harder, but Nicholas Knight suggests this kind
of thing isn't very reliable.

I notice Google.com now redirects to Google.co.uk, which is nice, so
maybe it *is* possible, but Google have a hell of a lot of resources
to throw at this kind of thing, and yet have taken years to get that
working. I remember seeing references to them doing this for Canada
long ago, and wondering why the same trick couldn't be used for the
UK; I believe they do it by IP address of something. Which means, of
course, that it wouldn't be much good for a strictly *language*-based,
rather than *geographic* test, which is what Wikipedia.com needs...

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]