Grégoire Colbert wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:
Frank v Waveren a écrit :
This would be a horrible abuse of HTTP. You
should only present the
same content in different languages based on the Accept-Language
field, never to different content. Having links point to different
things based on browser settings would be a nightmare.
The fact that
www.wikipedia.com does not care about the visitor's
language does not seem an "horrible abuse" to you? Only HTTP matters? If
so, you've got a strange vision of what a website is made for.
The issue is not that the portal should "not care" about the user's
language, but rather that different content should not be presented based
on the language; the same content should be presented in different
languages.
Since
en.wikipedia.org and
de.wikipedia.org do not have the same
content, it would not make sense to automatically redirect a user to either
one based on their preferred language. What should be done is, for
example, to highlight the Wikipedia(s) that exist in the user's language on
the portal page, and to display the portal's interface in their preferred
language.
Grégoire
Kate.