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Peter Körner:
> I'd like to have this possibility in my tools to select the source 
> wikipedia. If s/o uses it for translation, that's his thing ;) So I'd 
> too vote for this feature.

This is one good reason *not* to implement this feature -- we might intend for 
it to be used for interface language selection, but then someone starts using 
it for something completely different, like selecting Wikipedia language to 
operate on.  This would achieve nothing except confusing users, and render the 
feature useless.

I'm inclined not to implement this, because I don't see why interface language 
should get special treatment.  For example, most tools have a way to specify 
what project to operate on; should we support 
<http://de.enwiki.toolserver.org/~jsmith/mytool.fcgi> to specify that results 
should come from en.wikipedia.org and the interface should be in German?

The parallel to "en.wikipedia.org" / "de.wikipedia.org" is not a convincing 
argument, because dewiki is not just a translated version of enwiki, it's a 
completely separate site. 

Furthermore, this URL scheme breaks the hierarchical nature of a URL.  Normal 
URLs form a tree-like structure.  Given the following URLs:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
  http://toolserver.org/~jsmith/tool1.fcgi
  http://toolserver.org/~jsmith/tool2.fcgi
  http://toolserver.org/~jdoe/tool1.fcgi

a tree could be drawn like this:

                             http://
                            /       \
                           /         \
                   toolserver.org   en.wikipedia.org
                  /        |                |
              ~jsmith    ~jdoe             wiki
             /    |          \              |
      tool1.fcgi  tool2.fcgi  tool1.fcgi    Main_Page

But if the following URLs both refer to the same resource:

  http://en.toolserver.org/~jsmith/tool1.fcgi
  http://de.toolserver.org/~jsmith/tool1.fcgi

then you no longer represent the namespace as a tree; instead it's become a 
graph.

Finally, I don't see any actual advantage to this proposal; it doesn't seem to 
do anything that a query parameter can't do.

        - river.
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