Talk:Www.wikipedia.org template/2005

Language neutrality, search, logos

1. This page makes NO ATTEMPT to be language-neutral (it even gives its content language as EN at the top). 2. A search and a logo and sister projects are not needed, they will be provided upon arrival at the appropriate Wikipedia. Node ue 01:18, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The EN should probably be changed. Search and logo are useful to make the portal more immediately usable. In web page design, one should ALWAYS make a search box prominently available [1]; if you want the users to come to you, you can't steer them - David Gerard 19:51, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Again, this is a portal, not a sitewide mainpage. Its sole stated purpose is to direct people to a different Wikipedia. The problem here is that people like you continue to circulate wikipedia.org as the URL for "Wikipedia", rather than using the proper language-specific URLs based on which language medium you are advertising in. 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. The lack of popular distinction among English speakers between Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia is the issue here, NOT whether or not this is a portal or a frontpage. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/static/-/gateway/international-gateway/ref=gw_subnav_in/104-2193524-1431902 is a great example of what this page's function actually is. The search box is limited to the local site (which doesn't exist in the case of our portal), and is located AFTER all the languages, not in the middle (as Catherine proposes) or directly to the side (as in the current version). --.

Changes

How about changing all stylesheet and image links to en.wikipedia since that is the wiki people are most likely to enter after visiting this page, they would then be cached, furthermore, howabout changing the title to wikiepdia, the free encyclop... instead of just "wikipedia"? – Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:16, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I believe the latter was removed because it was in one language. Presumably we could do a logo with 'The Free Encyclopedia' in the six languages (soon to be seven) - David Gerard 19:46, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Speaking of changes, the Belarussian Wikipedia (be:) now has 1010 articles, but it is still in the 100-999 category on the portal page. Can somebody please fix this up, because I'm not an admin, and therefore, I can't edit it myself. Scott Gall

and th: and lv: as well, please. en:User:Dbachmann.

Thanks for fulfilling these requests. Now can you please add more wikis to the template? Scott Gall 08:25, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC) PS: I'll just be working on a temporary page. I will be back once it's done, and you can copy it over to the template. The article counts say that there are at least 100 articles in them.

Macedonian wiki link in 100+ languages

Many wikis including Macedonian wikipedia have been reached to 100 in article counts, but have not been included in the 100+ section. (See Talk:Complete list of language Wikipedias available#Macedonian wiki on first page.)

And "모든 언어" as the Korean translation of "other languages" should be replaced to "다른 언어".

--Puzzlet Chung 15:52, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I also made an addition of the Macedonian wiki link on Www.wikipedia.org template/temp page. Is this enough to get the link on the wikipedia.org page working? I am an admin on the Macedonian wiki, by the way. --Ivica83 18:04, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

No. Scott Gall 10:23, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As for Korean correction, I tried to fix it. Please check. As for updating, please prepare the whole version, not an update with a project. Thanks! --Aphaia | Translate Election | ++ 08:33, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Image longdesc links don't work right

The longdesc parameters for the images are relative links within meta, and don't work right when it's placed as www.wikipedia.org, as someone pointed out on en:Talk:Main Page. They need to be turned into absolute URLs that point to meta. 68.64.220.69 23:06, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

Fixed on the test page, now could someone switch to that. – ABCD 15:30, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Bug 2142

See MediaZilla Bug 2142 for a comprehensive list of changes needed. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 04:37, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

Maybe to get some attention to this issue, I'll crosspost the details here:

As stated at m:Talk:Www.wikipedia.org portal#To the admin team at Meta,, the Wikipedia portal (www.wikipedia.org) is woefully out-of-date. Many languages that have had 100 or more articles for months are still not listed, and several languages that should have been promoted to higher ranges, like the 1,000-article range, are still stuck at a lower range.

In detail, wikis that need to be added:

• Georgian Wikipedia (ka:)

  1,152 articles (1000+)

  [[ka:მთავარი გვერდი|ქართული]]

• Armenian Wikipedia (hy:)

  542 articles (100+)

  [[hy:Գլխավոր Էջ|Հայերէն]]

• Bengali Wikipedia (bn:)

  809 articles (100+)

  [[bn:প্রধান পাতা|বাংলা]]

• Northern Sami Wikipedia (se:)

  284 articles (100+)

  [[se:Váldosiidu|Sámegiella]]

• Breton Wikipedia (br:)

  288 articles (100+)

  [[br:Degemer|Brezhoneg]]

• Ossetian Wikipedia (os:)

  230 articles (100+)

  [[os:Сæйраг фарс|Ирон æвзаг]] (or [[os:Сæйраг фарс|Иронау]], which is used by

interwiki links)

• Tok Pisin Wikipedia (tpi:)

  113 articles (100+)

  [[tpi:|Tok Pisin]]

Wikis that need to be promoted:

• Vietnamese Wikipedia (vi:)

  1,216 articles (1000+)

  [[vi:Trang Chính|Tiếng Việt]]

• Javanese Wikipedia (jv:)

  1,419 articles (1000+)

  [[jv:Kaca Utama|Basa Jawi]]

Wikis whose article counts need to be updated:

• English Wikipedia (en:)

  557 000+ articles

• Japanese Wikipedia (ja:)

  116 000+ 記事

• Swedish Wikipedia (sv:)

  74 000+ artiklar

• Dutch Wikipedia (nl:)

  69 000+ artikelen

• Italian Wikipedia (it:)

  43 000+ articoli

• German Wikipedia (de:)

  229 000+ Artikel

• French Wikipedia (fr:)

  106 000+ articles

• Polish Wikipedia (pl:)

  66 000+ haseł

• Spanish Wikipedia (es:)

  47 000+ artículos

• Portuguese Wikipedia (pt:)

  48 000+ artigos

This task should be performed at least every few months, because it reflects the development of each Wikipedia community. A more diverse selection of languages on this page also gives the visitor the impression that we truly are a worldwide effort, not just a Euro-centric one.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 04:45, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

I took care of all these changes, plus the Estonian Wikipedia (et:), which I moved up to 10 000+, at the temp page. Now it has to be propagated to the portal itself. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 01:40, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Czech wikipedia has more then 10000 articles. --Li-sung 08:39, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Congratulations! I've moved Czech to the right section on the page at wikipedia.org. Angela 08:53, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedias with 10000+ articles needing to be updated include 한국어(Korean), Српски(Serbian), Bahasa Indonesia(Indonesian), Eesti(Estonian), and Magyar(Hungarian). --Puzzlet Chung 06:58, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Synchronize with /temp

This template desperately needs to be synchronized with /temp, which has continually been updated to reflect new languages, language milestones, and higher article counts for the largest wikis. In addition, the temporary page orders languages in a slightly more consistent way, and includes code to help browsers with font switching. This template has only been updated selectively, to include some languages (such as cv:), yet exclude others (such as bn:). It also has languages like vi: under the 100+ heading, although it should have been promoted to 1 000+ months ago. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 14:30, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I second that. It is no good the portal having things changed piecemeal whenever a meta admin stops by and feels like doing something. Minh has been working to maintain it over at temp, has been updating all the article counts, I've made a few more changes today, and I'm sure plenty of people are willing to maintain and update it, provided it gets used. All that needs to be done is for the contents of the temp page to be copied and pasted into this one. It won't take more than a few seconds. Let's hope someone gets round to doing it. Trilobite 08:55, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

sorry, i just updated the real page after a request on IRC, without knowing about the temp page. should i instead have updated the /temp page and copied it over? — kate

That's probably the best way to do it. It looks like Minh has been keeping track of the article counts and keeping the temp page up to date. I think the temp page will look after itself so long as people know it is being used as the source for the updates. All that needs to be done on the part of admins or developers or whoever is to copy the temp page over to here every so often, perhaps after a cursory check that no one has vandalised it or made a mess of something. If you could do this sometime that would be greatly appreciated. The temp page has various fixes incorporated. You can see it in action here. Thanks. Trilobite 15:01, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Success! I spoke to Silsor on IRC and the temp page has now been copied across. Trilobite 19:39, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'll keep a closer eye on the temp page from now on. silsor 21:14, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

---

Could Irish (ga; Gaeilge) be moved up to the 100+ section? --Kwekubo 11:21, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Done (on temp). Trilobite 13:03, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Whoah, sorry, rather big mistake - Irish should be in the 1000+ section! Sorry about that! --Kwekubo 13:20, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Don't worry, I thought it must have been a typo. Trilobite 13:28, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Language ordering

Moved from Talk:Www.wikipedia.org template/temp

Just to clarify, I'd like to explain the system we've been using to arrange the language editions. The largest ten Wikipedia editions are listed according to their article count, from greatest to least, left-to-right, and top to bottom.

The rest of the editions are listed as follows:

1. Languages written in a Latin-based alphabet – or in an alphabet that corresponds more or less to the Latin alphabet, such as Greek or Cyrillic – are ordered alphabetically, according to the native language name or Latin transliteration.
2. Languages written with any other writing system are listed first, in alphabetical order based on the Latin transliteration.
3. Languages are alphabetized according to the identifying word in the native language name. Thus, "Bahasa Melayu" is alphabetized between "Македонски" and "Norsk (nynorsk)," rather than between "Asturianu" and "Bân-lâm-gú."
4. If the language is known under more than one name, the most commonly–used name is listed. In some cases where more than one writing system is commonly used, each writing system used at that Wikipedia edition is listed, separated by a solidus (/).

In addition, every line includes the lang and xml:lang attributes, to assist Web browsers with font-switching.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 6 July 2005 22:20 (UTC)

Actually, Minh, if I recall correctly it was a unilateral change and there was never a vote. Current policy on individual Wikipedias for interwiki links runs counter to this, and it seems absolutely absurd to me that you're basically saying "well all those strange-looking languages which I can't make any sense of, I'll just put them all at the beginning". Now, how about some consistency? There aren't enough languages in any of the lists that it would ever be truly difficult to find a language. However, I think that with the majority of the languages it makes almost as much or even more sense to order them by code than by your current system. When I changed the order on this page, it took me a good amount of time to do so, and I certainly didn't do it without a reason. It makes no sense that Hebrew comes before Catalan -- if you use the English name, it will come after Catalan, if you use the transliteration, it will come after Catalan, and if you use the ISO code, it will still come after Catalan. But in your dopey system, it comes before. Also, what's the purpose of the transliterations in the titles for the links? --Node ue

I think this system is quite reasonable. Ordering by ISO code is an esoteric practice most readers will find counter-intuitive. It always annoys me when I've sorted interwiki links alphabetically by the name that's displayed and then someone comes along and does it by code, so that we end up with weird anomalies like "Suomi" ending up among languages beginning with F just because it had "fi" allocated to it by some irrelevant people. ISO is a non-starter in my view. It's also silly and biased to go sorting language names alphabetically as if they were all written in the Latin alphabet. It makes no sense to find "Հայերէն" in the list as if it was spelt "Hayeren", because it isn't "Hayeren" it's "Հայերէն". There are few enough non-Latin names that they can be put

So what? Any reasonable person will expect to find "Հայերէն" AFTER Aragonese and Chuvash, because - guess what - its English name is Armenian, and its name transliterated is "hayeren". Why the hell would anybody look for it at the beginning? That makes _absolutely no sense_. ISO code ordering is not counter-intuitive, and whether you like it or not it's how things are done everywhere else in Wikimedia.

I would hope that the reader would be able to tell, just by glancing at the list, that non-Latin scripts are being placed up front. The problem with using ISO codes is not so much that it's counter-intuitive: it's hidden. But to solve that problem, we'd have to go the way of Wikisource's main portal. Ick.

The organisation of Finnish is an anomaly. It's one extremely illogical sorting out of a sea of very reasonable ones.

I currently see the following anomalies (if you factor in the transliterations): Estonian (Eesti – et), Finnish (Suomi – fi), Hungarian (Magyar – hu), Korean (한국어 / Hangugeo – ko), Southern Min (Bân-lâm-gú – zh-min-nan), Ido (io), Latvian (Latviešu – lv), Ossetic (Ирон æвзаг / Iron avžag  – os), Albanian (Shqip – sq), Filipino (Tagalog – tl), Tatar (Tatarça – tt), Anglo-Saxon (Eald Englisc – ang), Haitian Creole (Kreyòl ayisyen – ht), Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ – kn), Maltese (Malti – mt), Northern Sami (Davvesámegilii – se), Tok Pisin (tpi). That's 17 out of the 95 or so in question. Some of these are only slightly misplaced, but they still serve to confuse readers who aren't familiar with an ISO scheme that may have been devised without any speakers of their language.

You're wrong about a few of these. Haitian Creole is going to be looked for under "Kreyòl". "Ayisyen" is just a qualifier to differentiate it from, say, Mauritian Creole or Seychellois Creole, in real life people generally just call it "Kreyòl".

Tok Pisin will be being looked for under "t", not "p". Unlike Indonesian and Malay, "Tok" is not a generic label that is discarded in alphabetisation. People are probably going to be looking for Northern Sami under "Sámegilii", alphabetically. Like with Haitian Creole, it's only there to avoid confusion and make it known that it's not also for, say, Inari Sami or Southern Sami. Outside of these, there are only a handful that are seriously out of place, Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, Southern Min, Ossetic, Anglo-Saxon, and Haitian Creole. Out of these, Finnish and Korean are in a list that is short enough and in large enough print that they will still be easy to find. Hungarian (H -> M) and Ossetic (O -> I) are still relatively close to where they would be in alphabetical order, and are still in the 1000+ list and shouldn't be that difficult to find. The only difficulties are Haitian Creole, Southern Min, and Anglo-Saxon. Haitian Creole isn't that bad. Many people will look for it under "h" anyways, as it is often ordered by its French name (Haïtien). Southern Min poses a real problem with confusion.

Anyhow, the ones that are "seriously off" -- Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, S. Min, Ossetic, Anglo-Saxon, and Haitian Creole, could perhaps be part of a compromise. For Finnish and Korean the need isn't so great, and I don't think it's really very great for any of the others either except S. Min.

And by the way, when you went ahead and changed the ordering scheme back to ISO codes, you forgot to place the bullets in the right places (such as the one after Chinese). You also forgot to move Southern Min, but I'm sure the Minnan speakers are now accustomed to people listing their language at the end, for no visibly apparent reason. And Simple English is in the same place, although that's understandable, since "simple" really isn't a language code, but "en" is. And Georgian (ქართული – ka) and Cashubian (Kaszëbsczi – csb) are in the wrong places, even according to the ISO scheme.

together without causing much trouble and without appearing to be randomly scattered about because of what their ISO codes happen to be. I think an exception can be made for Cyrillic and Greek which are sufficiently close and transliterate easily enough that it's reasonable to find "Русский" sorted under R, although I would also be happy to see all Cyrillic names sorted together at the

Oh, so Cyrillic and Greek are "sufficiently close" and "transliterate easily enough", yet Armenian, Georgian, and Arabic don't? How do you know this? Have you studied any of these alphabets? The simple fact is, Armenian is very easy to transliterate, and Հայերէն transliterates perfectly -- perfectly -- as "Hayeren", no ifs, ands, or buts.

Alright then, my mistake. If it is true that those scripts also transliterate that well (which does make sense given their geographical/cultural relationship to other languages in Europe and Asia), then I fully agree that they should go in the main list.

If the clause about "sufficiently close" scripts is a problem, we can just go ahead and move Cyrillic and Greek languages over to the first part of each list as well.

beginning if that's what people want. Now as for this comment about "well all those strange-looking languages which I can't make any sense of, I'll just put them all at the beginning", this is a non sequitur as far as I can see. What makes you think Minh or anyone else would put them at the beginning because he can't understand them? If anything, the ignorant course of action would be to pretend they were all written in the Latin alphabet and order them like that.

Well, so, it's NOT ignorant to pretend that Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, etc. are written in the Latin alphabet? Where's the logic here?? At least what Minh has to say (see below) has some logic to it. Yours is totally off the radar.

Even if this wasn't done out of ignorance, it would be Latin-centric. None of your three systems in the Hebrew example are really very sensible, as I'm sure you realise. It does make sense that Hebrew comes before Catalan, because it's written with a different alphabet, and shouldn't just be lumped in with all the Latin-script titles. Seperating out the alphabets is the best way. Since we mainly have names written in Latin script, along with a few representatives of other alphabets,

Why should different scripts be sorted in a completely different section? This is discrimination.

I was afraid that the charge of discrimination would come up. I wanted different scripts in a separate part of the list simply for practicality. I'm not psychologist, but it seems that just by glancing at my version of the list, you get an idea of what's going on.

But how is it in any way practical to separate different scripts?

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 21:28, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

there is no great need to specify an arbitrary order of alphabets whereby we'd have Devangari, then Arabic-based, and so on. The ordering of the language names not written in the Latin alphabet is always going to be fairly arbitrary, so ISO codes are as good as anything here I think. Feel free to propose a better way of sorting the non-Latin names, but just mixing them all in with the Latin ones and relying on ISO codes, Latin transliterations, or English names, would be a dopey system. The system we have now seems fine to me. Trilobite 07:13, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Well, it seems extremely rediculous to me, that Hebrew comes before Catalan. The Hebrew word for Hebrew is, when transliterated, "Ivrit". The ISO code is "he". The English word is Hebrew. The only tripped-up sorting order that places Hebrew *before* Catalan is yours. --Node ue

The change I made was mainly for consistency's sake, because the languages were previously ordered according to the whim of the last person to edit the page. The reason I went with the "rules" above was that everyday users of Wikipedia have probably never heard of ISO language codes, and thus wouldn't think to look for Finnish next to Esperanto and Indonesian. Also, the number of languages written in the Latin alphabet (henceforth to be called "Latinate languages" for brevity) on the portal is dwarfed by the number of non-Latinate languages. So I lumped all the non-Latinate languages together, hoping that part of my scheme would be fairly obvious.

The fact is, Finnish is really one of only a couple of languages that aren't readily findable in this sorting order. Yet, Finnish, being in the 10000-articles-or-more section, should not be difficult to find -- it's big enough that anybody should be able to find it. For most of the other languages, ISO order is compromise in a sea of chaos. In a relatively recent vote on the English Wikipedia, people voted narrowly to sort interwiki links by ISO code because there really is no other logical way.

But are we just going to say "tough luck" to speakers of those smaller non-Latinate languages, and force them to search for their language in "a sea of very reasonable [orderings]"? At least with the scheme that I used, they wouldn't have to search through such a long list.

It's unfortunate that this is one of those issues that can't be solved through consensus. The narrow vote, though, indicates that the ISO order perhaps isn't a great way to arrange the languages, though it may have been ever-so-slightly the best one available to the English Wikipedia community.

The "narrow vote"? You mean, you and Trilobite voicing your opinions in opposition to mine? And the option you favour is also available to en.wiki, so why would one be better there but not here?

As for the transliteration tooltips, I know you're not fond of using the transliterations in the first place – I'm still not sure why Tim Starling brought them back. I just put them there so that people looking at the code would have a clue how it's all arranged. The tooltips would serve just as well as comments – that's probably what I'll change it to when I have the time.

What do you mean, so they have a clue how it's all arranged? Why would comments be nessecary? People should be able to tell which Wikipedia it is by the ISO code. If they can't, they can always look it up. The script doesn't really make it any easier -- how is the average non-Hungarian-speaking Wikipedian to know that "magyar" means "Hungarian"? Certainly, it's just as hard to figure out "Magyar" as it is to figure out "Հայերէն", if you don't know Hungarian or Armenian. In fact, it might be marginally easier to figure out Հայերէն, because Armenian writing has a distinctive "feel", while Hungarian is written in Latin, like a heap of other languages on there.

When I said "they," I meant "those who edit the HTML code." And how do you expect the everyday user to "look it up," when they don't even realize that we're ordering by ISO code? They'll just glance at the list, not be able to find the language they want, and give up. (It took me a couple months to even notice the Vietnamese Wikipedia's link on the English Wikipedia way back when.)

We're dealing with such diverse languages here that, no matter the ordering scheme we use, there's going to be a seemingly random rule in there. I wouldn't mind if we ordered the non-Latinate languages by ISO code, since that part of the list is short, so it's relatively easy for the reader to pick a link from anyways.

Yes, but what seems most random to me is sorting languages by script. It has plenty of strange placements -- Hebrew before Catalan, Arabic before Afrikaans, Farsi before Asturian. And many, many others. Yet, with ISO, there are only a handful, Finnish, Hungarian, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean are the only ones that come to mind; all but one of these are big enough that they are in lists that are so short they should still be easy to find (Hungarian is not; yet hu... and ma... are close enough it still shouldn't be that difficult).

I'm not proposing to completely sort by script; just to divide the list into two sections, since that seems more practical IMHO. Hebrew may come before Catalan, Arabic before Afrikaans, and Farsi before Asturian, but it would seem obvious for a speaker of Hebrew, for example, to look in that first part of the list, since the second part clearly contains only languages written in the Latin alphabet (well, it would, given my proposal to eliminate the "sufficiently close" rule).

I really think that's just more bull. That is, for lack of a better term, discrimination. You are assuming that these people don't know the Roman alphabet. Also, languages like "hebrew" are in lists short enough and in large enough fonts that they won't have to go searching at all.

But I didn't want Tamil speakers, for example, scratching their heads as they search the entire (microscopic) 100+ list for their language, just because they don't happen to know the Latin transliteration. Speakers of Tok Pisin, on the other hand, would be able to at least figure out that tpi: is listed under either T or P. [By the way, we've got to make the text of that 100+ list a little larger. It's already a bit difficult for me to read the Latinate part of the list; just think of how Bengali (বাংলা) must feel.]

I can guarantee you that there is not a single Tamil speaker on the Internet who does not know that the transliteration for, and English translation of, the name of their language is "Tamil". There aren't a lot of people who are literate in Tamil and yet don't know the Latin alphabet, and probably none of these people have access to computers. I agree with making the 100+ list bigger, but Bengali should, if you have a good font, be about the same size as any other language.

So Tamil was a bad example, but that's probably not the case for every language out there. And my only Bengali font is one of those all-purpose Unicode fonts, so that could be the problem.

But it _is_ the case for every language out there. To use the Internet, knowing the Latin alphabet is pretty much a requirement as the vast majority of URLs use it, as do many input methods (especially for Indic languages).

Well, I suppose I don't have much room to speak about ease of navigation: I was the one who compiled the list of languages at vi:, and it's currently atrocious, because it once doubled as a statistics page. I've got to clean that up as well.

I'm certainly still upset about the rejection of _my_ proposal for the template, which had ALL of the current contents fitting into one 600x800 window. And why on Earth do we have a huge image at the top right now that says what is unmistakably English (not some universal interlanguage, no, but English) stuff about Wikimania?? This is a _portal_ page. Anybody who clicks on their appropriate language will get information about Wikimania immediately upon their arrival, and it will be in the proper language too. --Node ue

You mean this? It probably got rejected because most people were worried about how the page looked at the time, not how functional it was.

That's certainly true. But has that changed at all? --Node ue

Oh... by the way, I meant this one, not the one you linked which is much much older. --Node ue

Yeah, the Wikimania banner should contain just the name and logo, since it points to a website that's been translated into several languages. I think the "Wikipedia" wordmark belongs there, because that is the project's official name, isn't it? And most users will have to type in www.wikipedia.org to get to the site anyways, so they're probably aware of its Anglo-centric name. :^)

And I think we should stop threading our comments; this is going to get messy real soon.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 21:28, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Let's please stop threading the comments:

1. Pardon my ignorance, but when you simply call Haitian Creole "creole," isn't that a lot like saying "language," as in "English language"? Anyhow, I'm sorry for not knowing more about these languages.
2. Even though you classify those five or so languages as a "compromise," it still doesn't help people actually find their language, and that's what I'm most concerned about, since most newcomers are first directed to the main portal, which is where they either find their language or don't. If they don't find their language easily enough, they'll just give up – at that language's expense.
3. People I know always ask me for help with their computers for simple things like finding Paint in the Start Menu. Finding Paint's location in the Start Menu is kind of obvious me, and it's probably not that hard for you either (unless you're on Mac OS or Linux, of course). But for the multitude of computer users who aren't computer savvy, even searching through the Start Menu becomes a hassle. If they can't figure out their own computer, which uses their language, how are they to find a small link amidst the heap of strange-looking characters?
4. True, most Internet users probably have some understanding of a Latin-based alphabet, but why make people go through that hoop of hunting their language down in a longer list? By splitting each list up into no more than two sections, users don't have to look through a list of 42 languages, they would effectively have to look through a list of either eight or 30, for example (depending on the language). And in the second part of the list, the alphabetic sorting becomes more straightforward.
5. If setting all the non-Latin scripts to the front is discrimination, wouldn't that be some kind of positive discrimination for the speakers of those languages? :^) Actually, most of those languages were already being listed at the front before I came along and started maintaining that page. All I did was to make the sorting more consistent.
6. When I said "narrow vote," I was referring to the en: vote that you mentioned earlier:

   In a relatively recent vote on the English Wikipedia, people voted narrowly to sort interwiki links by ISO code because there really is no other logical way.

7. But yes, me and Trilobite voting against you would be a narrow vote. :^) Actually, I was mistakenly thinking of the vote regarding en:Template:Wikipedialang, the vote that you invited me to, coincidentally. :^) That template lists the languages' English names as well as the native names, so the situation is a bit different there, since it would kind of make sense to sort according to the English name if the English name is what appears first in every link.
8. Oh, something I forgot to reply to:

   ISO code ordering is not counter-intuitive, and whether you like it or not it's how things are done everywhere else in Wikimedia.

9. The Vietnamese-language projects arrange the languages according to how their displayed. Thus, "Bahasa Indonesia" is under B. That was the consensus there, and I know vi: isn't alone in that practice. (be: da: et: nn:). It's not completely intuitive, but at least our reasons aren't hidden behind an edit page – you can literally see why we put Indonesian under B, even if it doesn't make incredible sense. Another compromise, right? :^)
10. Your proposed design has some good ideas in it. (I take it that your design was more of a proof of concept, right?) In particular, I like that you replaced the "search" words with a magnifying glass. I'm surprised that it wasn't part of Catherine's design in the first place. Unfortunately, the background is dark enough that, on my monitor, it makes it slightly harder to read the foreground text. Also, I've been meaning to propose that the book icons become stacks of pages – that what the numbers more or less represent; the books would belong in Wikibooks' portal page, if they ever decided to make theirs look more like Wikipedia's.
11. Speaking of the design, I really liked the look of Forseti's design. (Though I would support replacing his background with the one in your proposal.) For awhile, there was an effort to merge Forseti's design with Catherine's, but it looks like nothing ever came of it.
12. Again, please don't thread the comments; I can figure out what you're saying if you post it all below this message. Thanks.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 01:50, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

I would like to number each paragraph of yours so I could have numbered responses to each. I've done this, if it's not OK feel free to remove the numbers from your comment.

So, here are my responses:

1. It may seem this way, but how many other creole languages do you think most Haitians are familiar with? Most have heard of other languages, such as French, English, Spanish, etc, but the only creole they really care about is Haitian Creole. So, the usual name for their language is "Kreyòl". "Ayisyen" is only used when it's nessecary to distinguish it from other creoles, as is the case here -- we don't want somebody coming to ht.wikipedia and writing articles in Mauritian Creole, which also goes by "Kreyòl" (in its case, "Kreyòl morisyen" is the more specific name). In Tok Pisin, "tok" is a general name for languages (as in "tok inglis", English), yet in an alphabetical list it will still be expected as a "t" rather than a "p".
2. With only a few exceptions, ISO order matches alphabetical, or it is only off by one or two. Many of the exceptions are languages with over 10k articles, so the font is big enough that they will still be easy to find (Finnish, Korean, Hebrew).
3. With Paint, it's something that you just have to look for, or know in advance. There's not even a hint of any logic to it. However, in ISO order, it's at least pseudo-alphabetical, so things should be realatively easy to find. Also, I don't know about you, but it's my guess that text in the Armenian script will jump out from all the other alphabets to an Armenian speaker.
4. As I noted in my previous numbered point, text in the script of your native language often seems to jump out from a jungle of text in other scripts. For me, text in the Roman alphabet jumps out from a long page of Arabic text, even though I can read Arabic to a degree. If you've ever seen the movie "Spirited Away", Chihiro is able to pick her parents (transformed into pigs) out of a group of seemingly-identical pigs. Presumably this is because of familiarity -- even though most people wouldn't be able to tell, she was able to because she was familiar with them, so they "jumped out" at her. With most non-Latin scripts, there are between 1 and 5 languages using the same script on this page, so if they all "jump out", it should not be difficult to find the right language from a maximum of 5 choices.
5. Positive discrimination, perhaps. But it will possibly be confusing to people who use the Latin alphabet, who see that each list starts off with strange characters (which may even appear as question marks if your browser doesn't support the script).
6. --
7. I actually meant one regarding interwikis.
8. --
9. You're right about that. But still, at the majority of Wikipedias, the consensus is to order by ISO code. One of the other brilliant Interwiki ideas was, on the Hebrew Wikipedia, to remove all Interwikis except to English, and /maybe/ French, Spanish, and Russian.
10. I'm pleased that you like my design. I agree about the books, but I'm afraid images of stacks of pages would be difficult to make out what they were supposed to be. I did however replace Catherine's ugly blue books with some nice, better-looking books. I'll try to fix the background. The entire point of my design was actually so that all of the languages would fit in one page, without modifying font sizes much. I'd also like to remove the search box as I think it's vile and inappropriate for a portal, but alas the consensus seemed to be that we should keep it. The other main point was to remove the "Wikipedia" image, because I don't think it's language neutral, and it also takes up quite a bit of space.
11. I really favoured Forseti's over Catherine's, but obviously EVERYBODy hates it... since his was entered into the vote a couple of days later, it's not exactly fair though.

    Node ue 22:06, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

1. Alright, you're the language expert. If you say so... :^)
2. You'll still have people scratching their heads, because how many readers of Wikipedia will have even heard of the ISO language codes? If we use the codes, we'll have to make the codes visible, without making the portal look as clumsy as Wikisource's. Any ideas on how to provide this information subtly? I'll try to come up with something, but getting the portal substantially changed would be an uphill battle.
3. By putting the shortcuts in folders, the Windows team (intentionally or otherwise) implied that there was some logic to the placement of shortcuts. But how many everyday users actually know why it's called "Accessories"?
4. No, I've never seen that movie before, but you're quite correct about different scripts "jumping out" – assuming that the lists are reasonably short, and that some of that text gets enlarged. The latter issue can be resolved easily, but shortening the lists by breaking them up into more article ranges is probably a bad idea. If a user doesn't know the transliteration for, say, Kannada – I'm just randomly using an example; I have no idea if Kannada-speakers mostly know the transliteration or not – it'll take a little while to find their link. But, then again, putting the non-Latin scripts up front might not help much more, since now many of those scripts will look alike. I just hope that most visitors will have the patience to find their language.
5. I don't really think that seeing those strange characters (or boxes) at the beginning of each list would necessarily confuse people. I think most people will be aware of the existence of other languages, and of other scripts like Chinese and Japanese and Arabic. I don't think they'll be that surprised that other scripts like Gujarati and Armenian exist.
6.  
7. Yes, my mistake.
8.  
9. I don't know if it's brilliant; it's probably very easy to maintain, but it might make readers think that there are only two versions: Hebrew and English. (You'd have to change "English" to "Other languages; please scroll down on the page you arrive at.") For a one-link solution to work, the link would have to lead to an "interwiki wiki," a middleman, in which each page lists only links to different versions of the same article. That wiki, though, would still have the same ordering issue as we do, and I'm stumped as to how they would name each page.
10. Regarding the wordmark, see my comments below. Regarding the space that said wordmark occupies, I liked that your design took care of that issue by presenting some names of Wikipedia in commonly-used languages. Regarding the search box: I know many people who'd be lost if the searchbox were removed from just the portal. Plus, it's probably more convenient for speakers of the ten largest languages who have dialup. I really have no idea what segment of the Wikipedia-reading population that is.
11. Yeah, I'd really like for there to be a revote. Forseti's sure fits with the Monobook skin better, since the two designs share the same background. The MediaWiki developers used Forseti's design for their blackout message before, and I have a clue as to why.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 02:08, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

(After edit conflict with Minh.) Agreed with that. My own comments have been chopped to pieces and replied to in bits out of context, and then all the rest of what's been said gives no immediately obvious indication as to who said it. Firstly, my view on the Wikimania banner is that it shouldn't be there at all. The word "Wikipedia" above the globe, which Node removed at one point, I do not regard as language-specific. Yes it's the English name of the project, but since it's also used for the URLs of all of them I think it's reasonable to regard it as the underlying universal name of Wikipedia. Versions like "ויקיפדיה" and "Uiquipedia" are just attempts to render something like "Wikipedia" in a way that's appropriate to the language being used. If Wikipedia had been started in Asturian maybe we'd have had http://en.uiquipedia.org/ and written it as "Wikipedia" for the English logo, but it would still have been reasonable to have "Uiquipedia" on the multilingual portal because all the language versions would have been at xx.uiquipedia.org and would have based their own spellings of the name on that word. Now as for Cyrillic and Greek, as I said, I would be happy to have them sorted at the beginning (actually I would prefer this). I know very well that Armenian and others can be transliterated just as Cyrillic and Greek can, so fine, let's have full seperation of alphabets instead of one rule for Cyrillic and Greek and another for Armenian. Please don't paint the mixing of these with Latin script as my suggestion (that is "totally off the radar" to use your rather inflammatory words) when all I said was that I was prepared to tolerate it - I don't like it and would prefer full seperation. We could order by alphabet first (though the order will be necessarily arbitrary - perhaps we should do it by least represented to most), then by alphabetical order within those alphabets. As for seperating alphabets being discrimination, this is nonsense, and they are not "in a completely different section", they are just at the beginning of the list instead of being arbitrarily mixed in with those in the Latin script according to their ISO codes. ISO codes are meaningless to the average visitor. We cannot accept it as reasonable that "Suomi" is sorted under "fi". Seperating alphabets makes it clear at a glance that you don't need to go searching through the list looking for your non-Latin language name under its transliterated form, its English name, or its ISO code. It is perfectly reasonable to seperate alphabets instead of trying to come up with some universal ordering system based on ISO or Latin transliteration. Another thing I have noticed is your altering of language names. While I'm all for accuracy I think it would be best if we took them from the names used for the interwiki links, and then argue seperately about what the interwiki links should say instead of just changing it here, resulting in inconsistency between the portal and what's used throughout all language editions as the text of interwiki links. For example, you changed "Kernewek" back to "Kernewek / Karnuack", but "Kernewek" suffices as the interwiki link. If Cornish speakers who want to promote different orthographies object to the bias of the spelling we use for the interwiki link they can argue that elsewhere and once they get it changed, the portal can be changed. If you want to be neutral and use all orthographies, you should also have included "Kernowek" since this is the Unified Cornish Revised version used even on the main page of the Cornish Wikipedia. Finally, if you are going to go editing the portal, please at least keep it tidy by remembering not to leave out the "•" at the end of lines and all the rest of it. Thanks. (And if you're going to reply point by point, please add numbers or something instead of chopping the comment up, since this isn't the mailing list and it's not so easy to keep track of who's said what). I hope we also get some input from other people here. Tim Starling? Trilobite 02:52, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm only going to reply to a couple of points here because I would say the rest are not worth responding to, or I have already responded.

1. "Wikipedia" is not language neutral. You make it sound like translations of the name are all fake somehow. My refutation is this: All Wikipedias which have a localised name, use it in ALL contexts except for the domain name. If what you said were the case, it would be like the Southern Min and Vietnamese Wikipedias, where the name used is "Wikipedia" but in the article on "Wikipedia" it explains that it's pronounced "ūi-ki̍h-phí-lī-ià" and "Uikhipéđia", respectively.
2. On the mainpage at kw.wiki, it uses ALL orthographies, with a separate introduction section in each. The interwiki link is a non-issue, wrong Interwikis stay wrong for ages without being changed.

   -Node ue 22:06, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

1. Regarding the wordmark: Likewise, the logo itself isn't completely neutral. The Romanian Wikipedia uses an Ă in one puzzle piece instead of an Й – they insisted on that modification, despite your efforts otherwise – and the Sicilian Wikipedia changed the shape of the logo entirely. You wouldn't propose including multiple versions of the logo, would you?
2. Keeping only one version of the logo on the main portal is a compromise (a no-brainer, really). You're apparently willing to compromise on the sorting of languages by ignoring the few "anomalies" for the sake of the "sea of very reasonable [sort positions]." So why not compromise on the wordmark as well? From a cursory glance, it seems that the vast majority of languages maintain "Wikipedia" as the project name, and many (like French) make only small changes:
   • 29 of the 69 languages at Wikipedia raster name use "Wikipedia" verbatim. Four more just add an accent mark. Four more just replace or add a letter, but the name is still recognizable either way.
   • Of the 67 translations at Wiktionary's Wikipedia entry, 26 are "Wikipedia" verbatim. Four more simply add an acute mark over the e. Two change only one letter. Four change two letters, while leaving the name still recognizable.
   • Of the 102 languages listed at Wikipedia logo in each language, 35 are verbatim, six add only diacritic marks, five only change or add one letter, and 12 change only two, keeping the name still recognizable.
3. In all, that's about half of the languages listed. I suppose the wordmark isn't absolutely essential, but it's an important part of the branding. You rarely see the logo without it. Plus, I don't know of any Wikipedia project that has changed their W favicon to a U or V. If people bugged the developers about it enough, they could probably change it, but I'd think that most Wikipedias are trying to associate themselves with the English Wikipedia, and the W certainly helps in that regard.
4. I don't know, perhaps I'm just wary of removing the wordmark because I remember the days before the puzzle ball. Back then, the wordmark was more unique to Wikipedia than the logo, to me at least. Ah, the good ol' days. :^P
5. By the way, "Uikhipéđia" is never mentioned in the Vietnamese article. You probably got that from a talk page or something, where I tried to explain to someone how I'd go about pronouncing it. In fact, others might pronounce it quite differently, something like "Ưikibiđia" or "Uikibéđi." And the more "correct" way (for some, especially in the academic community) might be to transliterate it from Chinese, in which case it might be "Hoài Cơ Bách Khoa," which wouldn't fit too well in the logo.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 02:08, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

1. There was actually never a vote at the Romanian Wikipedia, it seems to mostly be due to the persistence of Danutz. I'm still convinced that this is due to some degree of Slavophobia, as Romanians are resentful of the communist era which they associate with Russians. The Sicilian Wikipedia's logo has only been changed temporarily (in fact, I fixed it for them because they were having some troubles with it), this is for their "festival of quality" which has a focus on Sicily, similar to other temporary logo changes at fr:, it:, etc. for holidays and the like. So certainly with the possible exception of ro.wiki the globeball is neutral. I think that most people have come to associate it with Wikipedia, and as noted before the background is intended as a replacement for the raster name because I feel it's a waste of valuable space to have such a big thing on top which isn't language neutral at that.
2. Yes Minh, the majority keep "Wikipedia", but if you weight the count based on the size of the Wiki, you'll find that in the top 29 (by article count), 12 change it. 4 of these are still in the Latin alphabet. Only one qualifies as "minor" (French using Wikipédia). In my background, however, I chose one language from each script (English for Latin, Ukrainian for Cyrillic, Hebrew for Hebrew [as opposed to Yiddish, which uses a different name], Arabic for Arabic, Hindi for Devanagari). For Devanagari and Arabic, there is little or no variance between the different names in these scripts. This may not be "neutral", but it comes closer than having only one name. Also, it leaves some scripts out, for example Armenian and Georgian, but the Wikipedias in these languages are still relatively small. I did however design it when Georgian was still much tinier, so perhaps the addition of Georgian is in order.
3. -
4. -
5. -
6. I don't think most of them are concerned about associating or dissociating themselves with the English Wikipedia. The only example of a duality of names (one for the local version, another for the entire project) is at the Galician Wikipedia. They call themselves "Galipedia", but refer to the project as a whole (ie, including other languages) as "Wikipedia", and according to them Galipedia is a Wikipedia. There was a similar thing going on at the Minnan Wikipedia, but that was due to transition from a different domainname and is pretty much gone now. I don't think most people even notice the favourites logo, and the majority of people can't even see it because they use a stupid browser (i.e. IE).
7. I remember that. But then, at that time, the concept of non-English Wikipedias was still relatively new, and iirc this was before the English Wikipedia was moved to en.wikipedia.com.
8. Hoài Cơ Bách Khoa... now there's a laugh. That's actually what the Korean Wikipedia did, going for "Wikibaekkwa". And, while the Chinese name sounds rather nice in Mandarin (weiji baike), it sounds absolutely awful in Cantonese (waigei baakfo) and perhaps in Classical Chinese (uigiə bækkuɑ).

   Node ue 16:13, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

1. Yeah, whenever I choose photos for the Main Page at the Vietnamese Wikipedia, I always have to be careful about the images I select, because many people (especially in Southern California) can get very bitter about Communism and the Vietnam War. Now, if we ever move to using your background image, I'd suggest that you get the image cleaned up a bit – you know, some hinting etc. The font might be a little too stylistic – you could just rehash the wordmarks in Nohat's multilingual logos, and gray them out a bit. Also, with the wordmark gone, the page seems to be pushed up a bit too far. Maybe just allowing for a little margin at the top would make it more aesthetically pleasing.
2. Your statistics are still pretty much consistent with mine – about half keep the name untouched (17/29 = 58.6%). I want others to get into this discussion, so we can have outside opinions; the fact that you've tried to represent major scripts is a plus for your side of the argument.
3.  
4.  
5.  
6. Well, Vietnamese Wikipedia is very concerned about associating ourselves with the English edition. In the past year, a few projects have popped up claiming to be Vietnamese-language Wikipedia editions, when in fact they just happen to use MediaWiki. One project in particular, Vkpedia, actually touted itself as the Vietnamese edition of Wikipedia, when in fact they are not. Some major Vietnamese news outlets featured stories on Vkpedia as such, comparing them to the English Wikipedia without so much as mentioning the Vietnamese Wikipedia, which was founded more than a year after we started.
   
   Earlier this year, Vkpedia threatened to severely undermine our project, when some of our prominent contributors decided to jump ship. Anyway, Vkpedia has been dormant for a few months now. I suppose that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but imagine the surprise and confusion that people who've heard of Vkpedia must have when they stumble upon our Vietnamese edition.
   
   Just to clarify, I don't have any problem with Wikipedia editions branding themselves slightly differently. On the Vietnamese translation of the Wikimedia News page, I always mention the local Wikipedia name when I can, because it's fun to observe these projects' variety (independence, really). The Vietnamese Wikipedia finds it important to present itself as the official Vietnamese edition, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if others find it important as well.
   
   As for the favicon: well, that majority is decreasing with Firefox isn't it. :^)
7. IIRC, the concept of separate, non-English Wikipedias was considered a temporary hack, until the developers could figure out a better way of doing things. I've been tracking the development of the Devmo (Mozilla Developer Center) wiki, where they've actually implemented a single signon etc. for their five or so language editions.
8. Actually, I just checked on it again, and it turns out that my transliteration was incorrect (yay for using the Unihan database…). It's apparently "Duy Cơ Bách Khoa", which is at least shorter! [2]

How's about we try to get more people involved in this discussion – maybe hold yet another vote – before we change the language sorting policy on the actual portal? I've invited Tim Starling so far; I'll also post to the Vietnamese wiki communities.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 02:14, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Responding to Node:

1. "You make it sound like translations of the name are all fake somehow." Not at all, they are perfectly valid, and it's good to have localised variants of the name. This should be encouraged. However, as I said above, "Wikipedia" is the underlying universal name on which the others are based. Rather than justifying this in an anglocentric way, by saying that the English Wikipedia was the first and should therefore take priority somehow (which I don't believe), we can say this is valid because it's the URL of the whole site. I would use localised variants in ALL contexts except the domain name and the multilingual portal, which after all is the page that's located at the domain name with no language specified, so really all we are doing is providing a way for people to remember the domain name of a site which they can otherwise know by a localised name. Furthermore, as Minh says, we compromise on the logo even though this has some variants.
2. Maybe you ought to set about arguing for the interwikis to be changed then. I'd certainly support you if you're trying to fix those that are wrong. After all, this thing we're arguing about here is only the portal - a single page, although a very visible one. Meanwhile if someone writes an article in a certain language where the interwiki link has been got wrong, every equivalent of that article in every other language that links to it has its interwiki link wrong. Sorting this out is a higher priority, and getting it right allows us to be both accurate and consistent at the multilingual portal. Your response to my Cornish example made no sense. The main page uses four orthographies, with three variants of the word between them. The article on Cornish is located at Kernewek, and the interwiki links say "Kernewek". As far as I can see then, the options for the portal are "Kernewek" or "Kernewek / Kernowek / Kernuack".

I still haven't seen a good argument against alphabet seperation, though I'm quite open to one if you want to put the case instead of just saying perfectly reasonable points are not worth responding to. This seems obviously preferable to ISO codes with all their anomalies. I suspect you are too eager to see a desire in people to be language-specific, as suggested by your comment about the motivation for alphabet seperation being that the non-Latin names weren't understood by whoever was doing the seperation and could therefore be sidelined somehow. If you believe this, you are mistaken. I think all three of us in this discussion actually have pretty similar ideas about the equality of languages within the project (let's remember after all that many people at en: were strongly opposed to setting up a multilingual portal in the first place, claiming that en: was the flagship edition and all others were subsidiary, which I vehemently disagree with), but you're getting carried away and claiming things like the word "Wikipedia" cannot be used to name the project as a whole because there happen to be some localised versions of it. Imagine a hypothetical printed finished Wikipedia some years down the line, with a stack of volumes constituting a comprehensive encyclopaedia of similar size in every living natural language. Volumes of the Hebrew edition would have "ויקיפדיה" on the cover, and volumes of the Asturian edition would have "Uiquipedia" on the cover. If we stuck all these in a big Wikipedia library however it would be legitimate to have a sign reading "Wikipedia" on the door. This is all getting away from the original issue however, which is do we seperate the alphabets somehow (my preferred option), do we mix all alphabets and order by Latin transliteration (I could tolerate that and I suspect this may eventually be the way it gets done), or do we mix all alphabets and order by ISO code (bad idea that leads to silly anomalies)? I really hope someone else weighs in on this discussion. Trilobite 03:52, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Incidentally, I consider this issue to be bound up with the ordering of interwiki links. As more and more language editions grow, lots of articles are going to have large numbers of interwiki links, and we need a better way of organising them. I would like a set order to be built into the software, just as we build the names into the software instead of specifying them when editing the page, and then whichever order the links were found in the source text, they would be displayed in the sidebar according to the predefined pattern for sorting, whether it's by ISO or Latin transliteration or seperation of alphabets. Node mentioned consistency: well let's have some consistency between the portal and interwiki links. This makes it all the more important for others to get involved in the discussion. Trilobite 04:08, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I also think it's likely that the languages will eventually be ordered by transliteration, and there are a lot of arguments supporting that practice, not the least of which is consistency with the interwiki links. Has a bug ever been filed, requesting a software-defined order for interwiki links? If not, I'll gladly file the bug report.

I think environmentalists would be on our case if we attempted to publish the entirety of Wikipedia's content. :^) Following up on your library analogy: it would help if, in the next few years, Wikipedia builds up a brand around its logo. In order to do that, we'd have to use the logo religiously. Once the general public becomes as familiar with the puzzle ball as it is with Google's G, or the Windows logo, or Apple Computer's logo, then we can start omitting the project's name, because people won't have to be reminded of the name: the logo will immediately call the project to mind, in whatever language the person is used to. But for now, we need to help people associate our logo with our name.

I guess if we somehow made the portal less cluttered – I'm not sure it's even worth trying, since we have to list 100+ languages now – then we could go for a very simplistic, Apple-like style, in which the puzzle ball is very dominant in the design, and the wordmark wouldn't have to be.

Another thing: Node, I know that you were trying to pack most of the portal into one page with your proposed design, but even with my large resolution, it barely fits. I think that fitting all the languages in one screen would only work if we moved to a grid layout, something like Windows Explorer's list view (that would be overwhelming to the visitor, though).

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 05:21, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Minh you make some good comments. I don't know if a bug report has been filed about interwiki link ordering, but I've just brought the subject up on IRC to see if any of the developers who were around had an opinion on it. Didn't get too much of a reaction but there seems to be a slight preference for ISO, and not too much enthusiasm for a software-defined order (even though interwikis are already being sorted unofficially, and somewhat inconsistently). I think if they considered the matter though, people would appreciate that ISO anomalies are confusing to the casual reader ("suomi" sorted under "fi", "español" and "esperanto" appearing to be the wrong way round etc.), and that whatever we choose, we will need to specify an order at some point, either by policy or in the software, because we have dozens of Wikipedias getting bigger and bigger by the day. It might be worth filing a bug to try and start some discussion on this. The more I think about it, the more I'm coming round to alphabetical order by Latin transliteration. Trilobite 05:37, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia portal and portal-test tool don't update

I've gone ahead and filed a bug at MediaZilla because the portal-test tool won't use the latest version of whatever content page is given as a parameter. Thus, the Wikipedia portal can't be updated anymore. See Bug 2830. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 04:15, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

By the way, if anyone sees this who can fix it or work out what has happened, the "WIKIPEDIA" text on the portal above the globe used to be an image, but now appears to me to be showing the alt text. While this looks okay in Firefox, which puts it in big letters, (and perhaps it's better not to have images of text as a general principle), it means that it doesn't quite look like it does in the logos, and breaks totally in Internet Explorer, showing the red X. Trilobite 04:48, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Actually, that was already fixed, but because of Bug 2830, the change wasn't propagated onto the actual portal. Now that Bug 2830 has been fixed, the image is back. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 04:16, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Thanks for reporting the bug. Trilobite 06:38, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Scots Wikipedia

...now has an article ount of 115. Could someone add this? --Oldak Quill 20:12, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

It has already been added to the temp page; Scots will be listed on the actual portal when an administrator here updates the portal according to the temp page, but that probably won't happen until we've resolved the issues about language sorting (see above). – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 19:08, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Subtitle of Wikipedia in Spanish

most be "La enciclopedia libre" instead "La Enciclopedia Libre". May somebode please, please change it? --Huhsunqu 01:07, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Spanish Wikipedia logo

Dariusz changed it for you. I think I capitalized that line a long time ago, because that's the way it is in the Spanish Wikipedia's logo. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 03:30, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Need update to remove Wikimania banner

I have removed the Wikimania banner from the /temp page now that the Wikimania conference is over; we just need an admin to copy the temp page over again. Once that's done, someone needs to visit the Alexa update page for Wikipedia and click "Update Thumbnail Image of wikipedia.org" so they'll refresh their image without the banner. Thanks! Catherine 06:42, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Language sorting, round two

Trilobite, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the revision that you've made. To me, seeing each and every script listed separately looks even worse than it sounded when you described it. Is there any rhyme or reason behind the ordering of the scripts now? See, with the way I had it before, there were two variables involved in the sorting of languages: the name of the language, and whether or not it was written in Latin. With your system, that second variable is no longer boolean, if you will, so things just get more complicated.

I suppose that, to the ordinary user who doesn't know each of those non-Latin scripts, our two systems make no difference whatsoever. But now, how can you argue to Node that Armenian (hy:) goes after Urdu (ur:), but before Chuvash (cv:)?

For simplicity's sake, I was quite alright with your other proposal of doing away with language segregation altogether, which is what I eventually did in my test version of the page.

In any event, we should just choose one sort method and stick to it; I think any constant reshuffling of languages will only serve to confuse the users.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 03:32, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

By the way, I merged some changes I made at my test version into the main test version. Hopefully none of these changes will be so controversial, but you never know. :^) – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 03:43, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Hi Minh. If you remember the situation before all the discussion about language ordering (and right up until yesterday in fact, because the main portal's ordering had never been changed), we had language names in Latin script ordered alphabetically, with Cyrillic and Greek names interspersed according to their Latin transliterations, on the grounds that these looked relatively similar, had straightforward transliterations, and could be slotted in easily. It was quite rightly pointed out that other scripts, such as Armenian, also transliterated to Latin perfectly well, and it was unreasonable to seperate some scripts but not others, just because they looked less like Latin. What I've done is gone down the route of consistent script seperation. The main consequences of this are the grouping together of Cyrillic language names right before Latin instead of strewn about according to transliteration, and the grouping together of other scripts instead of mixing them all up and ordering by ISO code. The ordering of these grouped-together scripts is necessarily going to be somewhat arbitrary, I think, because unlike alphabetical order within a particular script, there is no established sequence to work from. This doesn't mean it has to be totally random, however. You asked if there was any rhyme or reason behind the ordering. I'll give you an example: Devanagari and similar (e.g. Bengali) are sorted together, followed by a group containing other Indic scripts whose characters are more curved in appearance and don't possess a 'washing line'. I think this is considerably more logical than having all Indic scripts mixed up arbitrarily with all the other non-Latin words. Now you're right that there are problems in script seperation. I've just noticed that while in the 1000+ section Arabic and Persian are grouped together at the beginning, in the 100+ section Urdu appears much later on. This is a relic of ISO ordering and is admittedly inconsistent. We can certainly debate how best to order the scripts and refine the system being used at the moment. As for doing away with segregation, there are certainly good arguments for that, but trying to unify the sorting of all these words written in wildly varying alphabets, abjads and abugidas, some of them written right-to-left (I dread to think how we would deal with Mongolian vertical scipt!) is inevitably going to be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. If we go down this route I think sorting alphabetically by Latin transliteration is the only viable option. It would have the disadvantage of being Latin-centric, although it would be fairly sensible because the majority of words in the list are written in Latin script, and the issue at hand would be how best to fit a differing minority into the sea of Latin-script words. Since it appears that your test portal doesn't slavishly follow ISO, but sensibly corrects for anomalies like Estonian/Esperanto and Finnish, I think I'll refrain from discussing the "ISO only" idea for now, which I would really object to. One last thing: I'm not sure it's a good idea to get rid of the tooltips. Lots of people have poor Unicode support, and being able to put their mouse over a word they can't see and get "Samskrta" is going to be more helpful to them than "????????". I agree with your enlargement of the 100+ section. I had wanted to do this myself but thought someone might object on the grounds that it gave undue prominence to Wikipedias with a very small number of articles. Personally I would have all three lists in the same size text, because I think the numbered headings make it clear to the reader that at this stage they're not going to get the same amount of content in Breton as they do in French. Cheers. Trilobite 19:32, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Update

Would the sysops here please continue synchronizing this page according to Www.wikipedia.org template/temp on a regular basis? Because it makes no sense maintaining that page if it's never used, and this page is instead updated piecemeal. There have been many changes to the listing lately, but only a few of them are reflected on this page right now. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 01:18, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Well, I've done it just now. Given that I don't partake in this page, however, I'm unlikely to know to update it unless I see a comment with "Update" in my watchlist, like I did here. :-)

James F. (talk) 13:39, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Time to update again, as the Italian Wikipedia just surpassed the Dutch and Polish ones, and now has become the sixth edition with over 100,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 16:52, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 02:22, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Sorry to bother you so often, but the Italian Wikipedia just passed the Swedish one, becoming the fifth-largest edition. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 19:15, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Done. Don't worry about it.

James F. (talk) 00:08, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Update again, since the Polish Wikipedia has passed 100,000. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 00:52, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 17:28, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Please update again; the Breton Wikipedia has passed 1,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 05:56, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Done. Sorry it took so long.

James F. (talk) 03:33, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Time to update yet again: the Polish Wikipedia has just passed the Italian one. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 04:31, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Datrio did this himself, and a little more; now re-synced.

James F. (talk) 14:52, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Update again; the English Wikipedia has reached 750,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 23:47, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 04:03, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

The Kapampangan Wikipedia has reached 100 articles, and according to ja:特別:Statistics, the Japanese Wikipedia has only 144,000 or so articles, not the 149,000 that is listed on the portal. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 20:46, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

And the Friulian Wikipedia has reached 100 too. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 06:33, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Updated.

James F. (talk) 13:53, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

The Waray-Waray Wikipedia has reached 100 articles as well. These are exciting times for minor languages. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 22:26, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 17:55, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 20:45, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Done. Also, added a notice to other sysops to not edit the template directly, as it can make things... complicated.

James F. (talk) 11:20, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Sorry I keep having to ask for an update every day... the Serbian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles. Also, wouldn't the sysop notice make more sense on the template itself, since that's what the sysops would try to edit at first? – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 06:49, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

No problem at all. Done.

James F. (talk) 11:54, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

The Chuvash Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 00:38, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 13:45, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles (and has a great logo for the occasion), and the Alemannic Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 23:50, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 00:48, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

The Neapolitan (as in ice cream) Wikipedia now has well over 100 articles. :^) – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 00:53, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Updated.

James F. (talk) 11:29, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

The Occitan Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 07:42, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Updated.

James F. (talk) 14:24, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

The Corsican Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles as well. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 04:27, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 17:55, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

The Ilokano Wikipedia has reached 100 articles, and a typo in the Friulian Wikipedia's link has been corrected. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 03:21, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 15:11, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

The Ido Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles, and the Japanese Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 19:59, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 08:48, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Time to update again: the Lowland Scots Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 19:38, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Also, the Võro Wikipedia has reached 100 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 03:31, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 18:56, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

The Azeri Wikipedia has reached 100 articles, and the English Wikipedia has reached 800,000. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 19:47, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 22:52, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

I haven't had a chance to update the article counts yet, but somehow we missed the Neapolitan Wikipedia ballooning up to over 2,000 articles, so I've added that in. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 03:21, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles, and I've moved Moldovan and Mongolian back to the beginning of the 100+ list, to be consistent with the rest of the Cyrillic languages. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 00:27, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 09:59, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

The Galician Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 21:02, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Updated.

James F. (talk) 10:58, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

The Amharic Wikipedia has reached 100 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 09:49, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Updated.

James F. (talk) 13:32, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

The Swahili Wikipedia has also reached 100 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 05:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Updated.

James F. (talk) 17:03, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for updating today; the Udmurt Wikipedia just reached 100 articles (and has a snazzy logo to prove it). – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 05:50, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 07:01, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

After a bit of a break, I've come back and updated the temp page yet again. :^) I see that you've already promoted Lithuanian, so I've updated all the article counts and addressed the two issues brought up by Matt Hall and an anonymous user below. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 00:35, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Also, the Malay Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 18:20, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles. Also, I've commented out the script tag to make synchronizing the page a bit easier. Is there any particular issue with the JavaScript that I cooked up? It seems to degrade gracefully without JavaScript support (in that the search box simply isn't focused onload), and most of the code (namely, the addLoadEvent() function) was based on en:MediaWiki:Monobook.js. If you have any concerns about the script, let me know and I can work to address them. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 04:36, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Done.

I don't have any particular concerns about the Javascript - it's certainly begnin, from a review - but it's just that I don't feel comfortable making the addition on my own, really. I'll ask someone else's opinion when I get a moment.

James F. (talk) 10:21, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I understand. The Cebuano Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles; I've updated the temp page to reflect that. I also decommented the script on the temp page so that people can see exactly what it does. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 07:37, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Oh, very well. I've made it live. :-)

Also updated generally.

James F. (talk) 19:48, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Wrong name

The name of Friulian language (fur.wiki) it's 'Furlan', not 'Furlane'; please change it thanks Klenje 13:26, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

By the way, you can fix any mistakes on this template at the test page. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 03:33, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Language sorting, round three

Samuel, before moving the Moldovan and Mongolian links to the Latin alphabet part of the list, please read our (rather lengthy) discussions above. Anyways, just moving those two links would be quite inconsistent, since you left many other Cyrillic alphabet links in their places. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 07:19, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Aha! Very well, it isn't a terribly big deal. As long as people can find what they're looking for... Sj 12:34, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Unintuitive Text Box

I suggest that the code for this page be changed so that the text box for searching Wikipedia contains the browser's insertion point by default rather than requiring a user to click. This reduces my productivity when I'm trying to search Wikipedia quickly because I must either hit the tab key tons of times or lift my hands from the keyboard to use the mouse. Matt R Hall -- 01 December 2005 02:13 PST GMT -0700

I added a touch of JavaScript to the temporary version of this template that does what you ask. Now we have to wait for an administrator to approve the change. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 00:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

By the way, Matt, you can easily attach the date at the end of your comments by typing out five squigglies (~~~~~). – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 05:59, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

удмурт

At the moment Udmurt is spelled with a small letter on the front page - shouldn't it have a capital "У" like all the others? 80.186.33.84 19:57, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I probably did that not realizing that it wasn't capitalized. The fonts on my computer don't distinguish capital and lowercase Cyrillic letters very well. I've fixed it in the temporary version; now we have to wait for an administrator to approve the changes. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 00:33, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

ms.wikipedia

Please move ms.wikipedia (Bahasa Melayu) from 1000+ to 10000+ Borgx 09:27, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Please note that you yourself can make the change (if you know a little HTML) at Www.wikipedia.org template/temp. Admins here synchronize the official version with that page every now and then. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 04:24, 26 December 2005 (UTC)