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Re:Wikipedia Redefined by rushone2009 on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @10:09PM (#4353494)
Google is a search engine designed to be fully functional in its simplicity. Wikipedia is a community.

If you use Wikipedia only as a search engine, you are missing out.

Re:Wikipedia Redefined by mibbitier on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @06:50AM (#4354884)
I'm not. I only ever use wikipedia the same way I would use an encyclopedia - to look up facts. I'm entirely uninterested in the community, just as I'm uninterested in the individual contributors to an encyclopedia.

The article makes some silly points, but it also makes some good ones. The front page of wikipedia shouldn't be mainly comprised of a list of languages - that's useless to most people. It should mainly be about search.

I've also never seen a "featured article" and am not really interested in using wikipedia like that.

Re:Wikipedia Redefined by na85 on Thursday August 09, 2012 @01:47AM (#4359722)
>The front page of wikipedia shouldn't be mainly comprised of a list of languages - that's useless to most people. It should mainly be about search.

How much page real estate does a page have to have devoted to what essentially boils down to typing a query into a search bar and pressing enter before it's considered "mainly about search"?

Re:Wikipedia Redefined by ajanuary on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @08:24AM (#4355143)
I'd say being told "this is a community that cares about non-English speaking people" isn't completely useless to most people.
Re:Wikipedia Redefined by mibbitier on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @09:02AM (#4355270)
It clearly cares about non-English speaking people, as there's many articles in other languages. As I say, I don't think the vast majority of people consider wikipedia as a "community". They consider it a place to find facts.

However, you don't dedicate 90% of your home page to 5% of use-cases.

Is it that hard to have a small dropdown language selection in one of the corners? I don't see why "language" needs to be the main thing on the wikipedia homepage.

Also I'm not sure going forward that language will matter that much. Chrome can already translate webpages to whatever language you choose with pretty good results.

Re:Wikipedia Redefined by huhtenberg on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @11:59PM (#4353818)
No, I am not.

I've been a part of the community, did daily edits for about a year, but ultimately there's just too many people who like to argue and enforce things (read - "delete shit left and right") rather than to actually contribute and edit. To each his own, but that community was not something that I would ever miss.