[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia.org portal is not...

Wed Feb 9 01:46:56 UTC 2005

I think some of the main disagreements regarding the portal page stem
from disagreements and misunderstandings of its purpose.

Some (myself, sj) believe it should be short and simple, with the sole
purpose of directing users quickly to their intended destination.

Others (GeorgeStepanek, David Gerard) believe it should be our "front
page", Mr Stepanek even advocating a Featured Article template for
each of the top 4 Wikipedias, Mr Gerard suggesting a logo including
the logo text in hexilingual fashion.

In the end nearly all the stylistic disagreements come down to one
question: What is the portal page? What is its purpose?

Before we can find a solution that is satisfactory to most parties
involved (ie, not just users from the en.villagepump and a couple of
others), we need to reach a consensus as to what exactly this portal
is.

My opinion is: The problem (and reason people think it is our
frontpage or that it should be) is that people continue to circulate
wikipedia.org as the URL for "Wikipedia", rather than using the proper
language-specific URLs based on the language medium in which you are
advertising. The only people who end up at wikipedia.org /should/ be
those who guess the URL, or those who pressed "I'm feeling lucky" at
Google (even that may lead to en:). The lack of popular distinction
among English speakers between Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia is
an issue, but it should not concern us when deciding whether we need a
frontpage, or a portal. We have used language-specific domains (and
until recently have redirected visibly to the en subdomain from the
wikipedia.org domain) for long enough now that if they still don't
know, they should be patient enough to look through the top six
languages to find English, which is featured very prominently (yet
some people still complain on en: - boo hoo!)

Mark