[Wikipedia-l] Switching everything to UTF-8

[Anthere]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 04:28:32AM -0500, Daniel Mayer
wrote:
> Peter Gervai wrote:
> >Could you point us to the page and revision of the
problem? 
> > couple examples:
> >
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org&diff=4613&oldid=4612
>
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&diff=20132&oldid=20130
> > This happens on meta's Main Page often. Ask
Anthere and Erik for 
other 
> examples. 

>I see. First is not a good example, Opera 5 is
>_ancient_, you can't expect that anyone would support
>it, as upgrading is clearly painless.

This is NOT true. I tried upgrading to Opera 6, and it
was unworkable, because it needed to much memory for
my computer to handle it. Sure enough, I did not break
anything any more, but the browser had great
slowliness, and crashed on average every 30 mn. This
is not precisely what I call *painless*

I kept it for a while, just to edit meta page, then
gave up because it was just too much hassle.

The upgrade is perfectly ok if you have a recent
computer. But you cannot expect every user to have so.
There was a big campaign about 4 years ago in France,
and many many people bought some imacs. I doubt very
much the casual user just bought a brand new computer
since then. Except for wikipedia, I did not meet any
problem with it, fine for power, fine for dvd, fine
for internet. Just problem on wikipedia. And I bought
a boosted one.

I know it is not possible for these users to use Opera
6, and not possible to switch to system X.

>Second example is indeed valid, but it isn't a
problem >for you: if the page does not contain
non-8859-1 >characters, nothing gets garbled. If it 
>does contain others then, well, you *need* utf-8 on
>that page anyway. (Embed codes are a little bit slow
>to type, don't you agree? If not, write  your
>reply manually by using embeds. :))

I do not understand that comment.

French people suggested they could just by hand
correct broken caracters.
This is not an option I fear

I just made an example : this is what appear after my
edit : http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine

Can you figure manually correcting each time after a
user ?

I have the plain answer : I saw a couple of reaction
on meta to my destructive edits; I was just reverted;
I know very well that if we switch to utf-8 on all
wikipedias without a technical tweak to automatically
insure "translation", the user of this browser,
perhaps just a mother at home with a 4 years old imac,
perhaps a student in Algeria, perhaps a kid in Brasil,
will just be kicked out.

Perhaps is it just 2%, and perhaps those editing
wikipedia right now are people technically better
equipped that the average human being connected to
internet, and perhaps we just do not want to keep it
that way, and perhaps we want liberty and openess.
Depends on what is important.
 

>I understand your problem, it is valid, and that's
>probably the reason it's topic on wikitech. Still I
>believe we can expect editors to use non-ancient
>browsers (remember, reading is not a problem).

But perhaps we do not want to exclude these people
from editing ?

>As far as I know most
>browsers handle this very well (including, for
>example, unix character 
>mode browsers).

And perhaps most users know nothing about unix



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