Wikipedia website changed to multilingual portal
After more than two years of sporadic discussion, the www.wikipedia.org domain changed Friday from a redirect to the English Wikipedia into a portal showing all Wikipedia languages having over 100 articles.
When it was created, the English Wikipedia was located at www.wikipedia.org (originally www.wikipedia.com). Other languages were assigned domains based on ISO 639 language codes. The English Wikipedia was eventually moved in October 2002 to the appropriate domain for its language code, en.wikipedia.org, while the previous domains were set to redirect people to the correct location.
The move to create a portal was endorsed by Jimmy Wales and acclaimed by Wikipedians from other languages as long overdue. However, the change surprised a number of people and upset some users of the English Wikipedia who disliked the new arrangement.