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Talk:What to do with www.wikipedia.org

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See also past and present mailing list discussion on the subject:

I don't have much time before having to scury off to school but I would like to say that having greetings for each of the languages is a great idea. I also like the idea of having an uber article count. More later. --maveric149

better avoid the american flag :-)) english is no equivalent to american, hu ?

Seriously, we should put a list of the different languages (or a specific word in each langage) at the top. To click on each on them could lead to the right place in the page (I mean, could anchors <a name> work on wikipedia ?!? that would be nice)
Better that each language tries not to be to talkative maybe, for this page is too big

something like

Welcome / Willkomen / Bienvenidos / Bienvenue / Velkommen...


ENES
DEPL
EOFR
NLNO
PTDK


anthere

How about this?

Mav's proposal moved to the subject page.

The welcome messages for each language project should either be organized so that they follow alphabetical order based on the language codes of each language project or they should be based on when each language was added to Wikipedia (foundation dates would then be in the table. It would also be easier to add languages to the table this way). I think either way is a fair way to organize the above list. I also like your idea of having different versions of the Main Page in different languages (the word "Welcome" at the very top and the name of the same language project in the table should be bold for each language with the foreign langueage equivelants italic. For example, . We can't except everybody to be able to speak English just to read the uber-welcome message. Of course, for each translation all the wiki links need to go to the correct articles in the correct languages. For example, in the French translation it would be necessary to link to the French article encyclopédie when that word first appears. There is no way to do this that I know of yet. Perhaps placing a colon before the language link like so, [[:fr:Encyclopédie]], would be the best way to do this? Developers? BTW, the way these links work now is not fair (w: is how you get to the English Wikipedia articles from here). --maveric149

The way it should work is that [[fr:Encyclopédie]] is an inline link to the French wiki that looks like Encyclopédie, and [[en:Encyclopedia]] is an inline link to the English wiki that looks like Encyclopedia. We should have a cleaner way of doing the magic interlanguage same-article-different-language links... but they shouldn't be magic on the meta 'pedia anyway, since nothing here is an article. I'd be happy to add a switch to make all interlanguage links inline instead of magic on a particular wiki (ie, the meta wiki after it's upgraded). --Brion

Having what would be a magic lingua link in one of the encyclopedias be an inline link here would be a most excellent idea! That would be yet another way to make it obvious that Metapedia is not an encyclopedia and is just a neutral place for all Wikipedians to work on whatever they want really (with few rules). Some type of convertion script could be run to change all the current w: links to en:. Then future w: links would go to the as-yet-not-implemented Wiki for the Foundation (at www.wikipedia.org). I still think a light gray background for non-user, non-talk and non-special pages would be a great way to further indicate that Metapedia is a different animal than any of the encyclopedias. --maveric149

I wonder if we should include the number of articles in parentheses under each wikipedia: english (100 000 articles) - german (5700) etc. By doing this we could avoid that someone goes directly to his language wikipedia, sees that there is almost nothing and leaves because he thinks it is an irrelevant project without having seen (f.e. in the english wikipedia) to what this project could grow. And for the wikipedians it would be nice to see at a single page how all the different wikipedias are growing. --elian

That's a good idea. I will add that to the proposal. Although the above proposal wouldn't have inactive or moribund Wikipedia language projects in the table. If I remember right there are technically 40 or so different Wikipedia language projects but most of those are dormant. These can be listed at the bottom of the page with some kind of special heading that would aim to encourage readers to enliven a project in their language. --maveric149
I don't think that having a long paragraph explaining Wikipedia is helpful.
  1. it's in English only
  2. it's repeated on the main page

Just "Wikipedia" will do, since that is the name of the entire project, then the table as above. --Tarquin

I don't think you read my proposal very carefully. Look at the top of the proposal, there you will see the word "Welcome" in several different languages. Each one would go to an exact translation of the Uber Main Page. Each table will be a carbon copy of the others. The only difference will be that the French Wikipedia will be bolded in the French version of the Uber Main Page and the German Wikipedia will be bolded in the German version of the Uber Main Page etc. Since English is the lingua Franca of the Web the English version of the Uber Main Page could be the default one displayed at www.wikipedia.org (alternatively we could have URL sniffers to sort out where a person is coming from and redirect them to the "correct" language -- but many people don't like those types of sniffers).
It is also very very important to have an uber description -- the whole point of this entire thing is to emphasis that Wikipedia is'is a larger project than the sum of its parts. This will even be more important when the non-profit is set-up since the Uber Main Page will also be the Main Page for the foundation and some mention of the Foundation is also needed. What I would really like to see is the Foundation having its own separate Wiki where its Recent Changes is defaulted to display every edit made in each Wikipedia encyclopedia. Then somebody hitting the Uber Main Page can then quickly go to Recent Changes and see what the entire project is doing. But that will have to wait for the Foundation to be set-up and for the developers to make this magic happen. --maveric149
I see your point about an exposition of the "Wikipedia Foundation". I had taken that text to be a copy of the opening text on En:MainPage. I still think we should keep monolingual text to a minimum on the .ORG page. -- Tarquin

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