Talk:Wikimedia Language Portals

August 2015

Thank you for looking at the proposal. Please feel free to comment or to make suggestions. Green Giant (talk) 00:30, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

This is an interesting idea. I'm not sure about the proposed domain name system. We've basically already reserved XX.wikimedia.org for Wikimedia Chapters. Regarding the content, I'm not sure how you'd keep such pages up-to-date easily. We still don't have interwiki transclusion, so you'd probably be relying on a bot of some kind? --MZMcBride (talk) 03:47, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Yeah I realised that there were chapters sitting there, which is why I thought some could go into three letter ones. Alternatively we could spell out the full name where there might be ambiguity e.g. "arabic.wikimedia.org" to avoid any mix-up with ar.wikimedia.org" which is already occupied by Wikimedia Argentina. That said, I was also wondering why we don't have redirects like "english.wikipedia.org" and "french.wikipedia.org or francais.wikipedia.org" because I imagine that these might be commons search terms?

As for the content I was thinking that it would be done mainly by bot(s), because I'm not sure humans would have the patience. There wouldn't be much else to do because the decision on featured content would still be done by wikis. If they didn't have regularly rotated content, they could just decide on a temporary piece of work(s) until they get organized. Interwiki transclusion will be even better if and when it gets implemented.

About viewing the pages, it would be good to have the links for logging in and creating an account that would normally be seen if you weren't logged in at a particular wiki, but this isn't essential. However if you were logged in, it would be nice to be able to view these portals as special pages in the same way that Special:CentralAuth can be viewed on almost any wiki. Green Giant (talk) 08:08, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Concerning Ukraine in your example, we already have enough confusion between uk (Ukrainian language) and ua (Ukraine) codes. People are already looking for ua.wikipedia.org and uk.wikimedia.org. Please do not create further confusion by adding a third code for a project with little benefits.

In addition, I have serious doubts that wikimedia.org receives any signifcant traffic (and thus those **.wikimedia.org will get any reasonable number of visits), and I have even more serious doubts that we will have any content in most languages. Bear in mind that some non-English Wikipedias do not have any system for featured articles, and I am not even speaking of featured news in non-English Wikinews or word of the day in non-English Wiktionaries — they simply don't have enough content and resources to select those regularly. I think that these semi-empty pages are not worth creating a mess with codes — NickK (talk) 16:05, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

• (ec)If we ever decide to implement this, I'm not sure whether we should do this for all languages as the large majority of wikis doesn't have featured content etc which is updated regularly. Also, I'd very much like consistency in the system for domain names. For example, having ar.wikimedia.org for Wikimedia Argentina but ar language projects for Arabic wikis would be a huge mess. There really needs to be a proper way to handle that. Otherwise, there would be huge confusion among users and lots of issues would arise sooner or later. --Glaisher (talk) 16:11, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

ISO codes As pointed out here and in the proposal, the clash of ISO codes for languages versus countries is definitely a problem: this would have been a much more workable and attractive proposal a long time ago, unfortunately. It seems like that portal page is deliberately sparse: can anyone point me to discussion of why? I think a nice overview of featured content from the various projects would be good. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:17, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

NickK, thank you for pointing out the problems with uk and ua. Could this be solved by having "ukrainian.wikimedia.org" instead? In fact would this be preferrable for most languages? I don't have any data on how many people visit "wikimedia.org" because Wikistats doesn't seem to have covered this. However, it ranks as approximately 230th worldwide and 33rd in the US according to Alexa, although I'm not saying this is authoritative and the numbers can change. It will always be overshadowed by Wikipedia (top 10 globally and in the US), but the distinction might be lost on many people. To me the fact that wikimedia.org is in the top 250 websites worldwide suggests a fair few people must be visiting it, but perhaps I'm wrong. As for featured content, I can't vouch for them all but Wikimedia:Featured content suggests that there at least 134 Wikipedias with sone featured content system and 161 wikis overall. Is there reason to doubt that this number will increase, albeit slowly? Initially the featured content would only be used where it exists (I think the English, French, German, Spanish and Italian ones have the most). Obviously if there is no content to display for a particular language, there would be just links in the same way that "wikipedia.org" does. Perhaps I've emphasised it wrongly but the core idea is to have language-specific portals that aren't being provided by the monolingual "wikimedia.org". As Koavf says, an overview of featured content would be nice. Green Giant (talk) 20:28, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Concerning codes, as I have already written adding a third code will be misleading. The only website using "ukrainian." as a code http://ukrainian.voanews.com/ , all other websites use uk or ua, and I don' think people will really type ukrainian.wikimedia.org (searching for it is useless as you will most likely directly find what you want). Concerning content, as I can see from Wikidata, only English has featured content in all projects (except that Featured quote project is inactive on English Wikiquote). The next closest is Italian with only featured texts on Wikisource lacking. All other languages have at least two projects lacking, thus effectively your proposal will work for English only — NickK (talk) 16:13, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Justin: I wouldn't say <https://www.wikimedia.org> is sparse, exactly, just minimalist. :-) But I think the real answer to your question is that it's a decent amount of work to keep pages that are full of content from the wikis up to date, especially in many languages. For more dynamic content, we have <https://blog.wikimedia.org> of course. The page itself is controlled by www.wikimedia.org template. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:06, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

NickK++ re both language codes and unrealistic content expectations based on English Wikipedia. Also, this generally seems to me to be a solution looking for a problem. Ijon (talk) 16:34, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Sorry if I'm misreading your comment but don't you think that wikimedia.org should be geared to as many languages as have been approved for Wikipedia at least? This is part of the systemic bias towards English, and I don't see why the old mantra "solution in search of a problem" applies here. The 230th most visited website in the world should surely be a high priority? Green Giant (talk) 22:09, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

In fact, would you be able to tell us if there are any statistics for how many times the page was visited, or if not, can you point us to someone who might know? Green Giant (talk) 23:26, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

I think the subdomain setup is probably out for the reasons people have mentioned. In my mind, the need to keep those available for affiliates and WMF projects use is a serious barrier and problem. If, for example, something happened in the Ukraine that the WMF felt compelled to engage in for whatever reason (why this might happen is a debate for another thread) - not having that subdomain available could be problematic. Even three letter domains is tricky as in theory a thematic organization might have an assigned three letter acronym. Generally we try to avoid using language codes for non-location based affiliates - but in theory that might not be sustainable forever. However, I think this could be worked around perhaps using some of the lessons learned from the development of the Translate extension. I like the idea of giving WM.org a facelift, and agree the language issues would need to be addressed. I am not comfortable using subdomains to do it. --Varnent (talk)^(COI) 19:13, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Varnent, my preference would be subdomains (even with full names) but if it is easier to do this as pages on Meta, then I'm not going to complain. Green Giant (talk) 23:28, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

I don't really see the problem to be solved here. Many people already see the main page of Wikipedia language versions. Below on such a page, you usually find links to other Wikimedia wikis. That is a great adversising for these wikis - many commercial websites would love to be listed there. Even if that is not enough to 'showcase' these wikis, I don't believe that "xx.wikimedia.org" will attract (and send through) more readers. Ziko (talk) 16:09, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Apologies if it isn't clear but the idea is to complete the circle. We have one half of the circle which is the languages organized by the type of project. The missing half of the circle is to organise the types of project by language. To me it doesn't make sense that we only cater to one way of looking at the numerous wikis? Can we really say that it wouldn't be helpful to have a portal that presents all the deutsche projects or all the français projects (plus the multilingual wikis)? Green Giant (talk) 21:22, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Ok, let's say we forget the subdomains as being too complex; what about a central wiki at wikimedia.org with a set of pages like this:

main.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deutsch

main.wikimedia.org/wiki/English

main.wikimedia.org/wiki/Français

I've added a link to an English Wikipedia page that had the same idea but hasn't been updated since 2014. Thoughts? Green Giant (talk) 11:30, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Design proposals

Hello, I like the idea of Wikimedia language portals. Do you have a page design proposal? Or should I start making one right now? --NaBUru38 (talk) 22:30, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the offer. I was thinking that they should look like the Main Pages of wikis e.g. English Wikipedia, where a portion is allocated to each theme (featured article in one corner, news in another corner, the did-you-knows below them etc). So for the English page, there would be ten sections to cater for the different types of featured content, with prominent links to the main pages of each wiki. However, any design proposal would be very welcome. Green Giant (talk) 23:24, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

@NaBUru38: I'm not sure how far you've got but there is an example on English Wikipedia of a portal that shows featured content from other projects, albeit not updated since 2014. I've added the link to the proposal page because it would be the sort of page I was thinking of. Green Giant (talk) 11:17, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Ok, it's a good base. I've made a few changes to that English Wikipedia portal. --NaBUru38 (talk) 23:19, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

September 2015

I support the idea as a whole. It will be a good motivation for the development and of the featured content and keeping it up-to-date. One small note about language code: it would be the better to use the same codes that already used for language domains. And moving wikis of Wikimedia chapters to new "wm**." subdomains (as example, ru.wikimedia.org > wmru.wikimedia.org). It will provide a way to match interwiki that as well. --Kaganer (talk) 10:54, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Three-letter codes for languages, two-letter codes for countries, reducing number of 2nd-level domains

As proposed at Wikimedia language code that will give languages more equal standing, currently some have a short two-letter, some have a longer three-letter code and some have even longer codes.

Also, paralleling

• http://commons.wikimedia.org
• http://species.wikimedia.org
• http://meta.wikimedia.org
• http://wikitech.wikimedia.org
• http://incubator.wikimedia.org
• http://stats.wikimedia.org
• http://outreach.wikimedia.org
• http://lists.wikimedia.org
• http://phabricator.wikimedia.org

several projects can switch the domain:

• http://wikibooks.org -> http://books.wikimedia.org
• http://wikidata.org -> http://data.wikimedia.org
• http://wikisource.org -> http://source.wikimedia.org
• http://wikiversity.org -> http://versity.wikimedia.org
• http://wikivoyage.org -> http://voyage.wikimedia.org OR http://travel.wikimedia.org
• http://wikiquote.org -> http://quote.wikimedia.org
• http://wikinews.org -> http://news.wikimedia.org
• http://wiktionary.org -> http://dict.wikimedia.org OR http://dictionary.wikimedia.org

Maybe also

• http://tools.wmflabs.org/ -> http://tools.wikimedia.org

Reducing the number of 2nd-level domains can:

• strengthen the brand Wikimedia
• increase the feeling of working for one common goal - knowledge presentation - and thus increasing cooperation
• decrease legal issues, as currently the setting of cookies under other domains, could be a violation of European law on cookies
• decrease costs for domains and SSL certificates
• decrease chances that wiki<something>.org sites are taken for Wikimedia projects

Additionally one could merge projects. Commons [File:] and data [Property:, Item:] could be run as one project with different namespaces. 91.9.112.72 16:58, 9 October 2015 (UTC)