[Foundation-l] The problem with Incubator: An interactive journey

Tue Aug 9 00:49:13 UTC 2011

I have a feeling very, very, very few French speakers find the French
Wikipedia through that route. Most people probably find a Wikipedia in their
language at http://www.wikipedia.org/ if they don't already know the URL. I
doubt many speakers will google "Central Atlas Tamazight Wikipedia" in
English like that. I think there are probably also some who find it on a
main page of a larger wiki, or notice it in the interwiki links of an
article they're reading (however, as the number of interwiki links at each
article grows, this option becomes less likely).

So of course none of these mechanisms allows for someone to find Incubator.
http://www.wikipedia.org/ should have a prominently-placed link for people
whose language is not listed (not sure how to do that language-neutrally
though), allowing them to look for it at incubator, and if it's not there,
direct them to a USER FRIENDLY request system (our current one is not) so
they can request a new wiki in their language and start working on a
testwiki.

Main pages of projects should also link to incubator just like they link to
Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikispecies, etc., if not placing the link even more
prominently than that.

2011/8/8 Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org>

> On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Thomas Goldammer <thogol at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> > That'd be great, indeed. But if there is an article in enwiki about
> > that language, there is always also a link to the project(s), even if
> > it is in the incubator, example:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afar_language (it's near the bottom and
> > on the right edge, though, so one might not see it easily). Maybe one
> > could convince the communities to have such a link in other
> > wikipediae, too...
>
> I was just going to bring that up too. :-)
>
> It's obviously not a perfect solution, but it's likely that if someone
> were looking for a Wikipedia in their language, they'd probably type
> it into Google. So if we type in "Central Morocco Tamazight
> wikipedia", we get a link to
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Atlas_Tamazight> in the first
> result. They read more about what the article has to say, and then
> they see the link at the bottom and click on it. Much fewer steps, and
> at least a bit clearer/more logical.
>
> (This is actually what we do with many of the languages, at least on
> enwiki. See French for example:
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language#External_links>.)
>
> --
> Casey Brown
> Cbrown1023
>
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