On Friday 24 January 2003 04:00 am, wikipedia-l-request(a)wikipedia.org wrote:
3) If we use a portal, it should at least offer some
additional features,
such as a multi-language search and multi-language Recent Changes. This is
not possible with the current software because all Wikipedias are separate.
Regards,
Erik
Ditto. I'm all for waiting for a multilanguage phase IV or at least a
multilanguage enhanced phase III before going live with the multilanguage
portal.
A portal would be just symbolic windowdressing if we don't at least have a
unified user database and the ability to easily search all languages at once
(sorry Brion your nifty meta search thingy is still just a nifty little
thingy) . Other features such a unified Recent Changes linked from the
portal, better handling of interlanguage links and the ability to select the
language your interface is in are also important but not vital to the success
of a portal.
A multilanguage portal is a big change that explicitly states our website is
multilanguage enabled -- except for some clumsy multilanguage links, it
isn't. We should do this right and actually have the software catch-up with
our expectations about what our project is.
Until a portal and the multilanguage-enabled software behind it are ready, we
could implement the 'browser language sniffing' idea so that people are
automatically brought to the language which corresponds to their browser
settings (if that wiki has say, more than 100 articles and has been upgraded
- otherwise they go to the English Wikipedia as they do now).
We should also think about moving the English Wikipedia from
http://www.wikipeida.org to
http://wikipedia.org/en/ as Brion and others have
suggested. But we could just as easily wait for the multilanguage phase IV
and then move all the wikis to
http://wikipedia.org/{language code}/ as they
are upgraded and converted to the new common database. Aside: IMO having what
look like separate URLs only tends to enforce the feeling that we are not one
multilanguage project.
A portal right now would be pure symbolism. I and several others have spent
many hours reworking the English Main Page. A big part of the reworking was
to give links to and about the other languages more prominence. Additional
suggestions are still welcome of course.
--mav
WikiKarma:
I updated all the year pages and many of the other articles linked from
[[January 21]] and [[January 22]].