Unfortunately, Ashar, what people should use and what they do use are two different matters.

It is all well and good to be in favour of using Firefox and, I use Firefox with pleasure HOWEVER, when used with texts in Farsi, and Arabic IE is to be preferred, it allows me to upload soundfiles with a name consisting of mixed alphabetic and arabic text. When reading a Farsi text, the default size of texts is such that you can read the characters with IE while they are almost unreadable because of their small size with Firefox. Add to that this, the pesky upload symbol that makes the first character unreadable and I must say that the case for IE is overwhelming in favour. Just saying that Firefox is better is plain stupid when the argument IS that it does underperform. Saying that this "download figure" can be fixed is nice but it does not help the case for Firefox until it is fixed. So I am fully aware why there is a such a strong case for IE and against Firefox when used with Farsi and propably Urdu, Arabic and Hebrew.

....and Gerard, the links in the articles entered in the form: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITEM A B C etc] keep on disappearing. We can't have an articles to all the relevant links in Tumbuka (not within a short time, anyway) hence the references to the English relevant entries. What could be causing that, someone deliberately changing them or does the system change links automatically to the form [[ITEM A B C etc]]? _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Hello Dinette, On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:49:55 +0200, Mamma Mia <dinnette(a)softhome.net> wrote: I'm not sure I understand you. Are you saying that links entered in the chiTumbuka wikipedia, in the form [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITEM A B C etc], are being rewritten somehow as [[ITEM A B C etc]]? If that's happening automatically, that's a problem. One possible solution is, instead of entering them as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITEM A B C etc] to enter them as [[:en:ITEM A B C etc|ITEM A B C etc]] For example, I believe [[:en:Canada|Canada]] will point at the English wikipedia version of the article on Canada from any wikipedia (French, German, chiTumbuka). Hopefully using the wikipedia-style link above will prevent the automatic replacement from happening. Additionally, you might want to include some kind of notice to readers that the link they're about to follow contains English text (in case they don't read English). Regards, Steve _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

I had actually intended to send that email to Gerard privately and guess where it ended? In fact am glad it ended here because now I have received more advice than I would have received from Gerard alone. Mark, I do get you, and you'll have noticed that I actually said that with time I hope most relevant articles will have been translated into chiTumbuka but that takes time and in the meantime it's a way of helping the reader get more information, albeit in English. The current 'depth' of the articles in chiTumbuka is such that a reader with limited knowledge of English should find the article detailed enough for information purposes but at the same time give those that understand English an opportunity to learn more about the items mentioned in the article. This is what I have seen in English articles - the articles themselves are complete, cross-linking just helps you get more information on an item mentioned in that article. At the moment only my husband and I have contributed articles and we are both in full-time employment and that puts a limit to what we can do but I am selling the idea to friends and I am optimistic that in time we should have a 'semi-self sufficient' wikipedia. Normally you don't get that much participation on most e-fora this time of the year as people are too busy getting ready for the holidays. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Williamson" <node.ue(a)gmail.com> To: "Stephen Forrest" <stephen.forrest(a)gmail.com>om>; <wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org> Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2004 2:24 AM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia email _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Mamma Mia wrote: Umm... I guess that means that the mail address Gerard set in his preferences is wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org This seems to me to be a Bad Idea. When someone mails privately they really should be able to expect that it will not be delivered directly to a public mailing list