Hi,
Another edition of i18n software news!
Yesterday, a change was deployed in the Bashkir Wikipedia: The categories
are now sorted in the correct alphabetical order.
Bashkir, like many languages of the Soviet Union, uses the Cyrillic
alphabet with several extra characters. Without proper software support,
the extra letters are sorted according according to their Unicode character
number order, which is not very useful. For example, the letter Ө is
supposed to be in the middle of the alphabet between О and П, but without
correct collation it's in the end, so Ufa (Өфө), the capital of
Bashkortostan, appears in the very end of the alphabet in the "Capitals of
Russian regions" category [1] , but now it appears correctly before П.
This could be resolved by adding the collation for this language to CLDR
and ICU, and I filed a ticket about this with CLDR [2]. Actually getting it
added and deployed is a long process, but the MediaWiki developer Brian
Wolff provided a good interim solution in MediaWiki code itself. The
infrastructure code around it is surprisingly tricky, but to simply add a
new alphabet, you just need to create a file like this:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/mediawiki/browse/master/includes/c…
When it is added to CLDR and ICU, this stopgap solution can be removed from
MediaWiki.
As far as I can see, Bashkir is the first language for which such a
comprehensive solution was made inside MediaWiki, and it is needed for many
others. I'll start looking for other languages where this is needed. My
process would be something like this:
1. Find a languages in which there is a Wikipedia with incorrect collation.
2. Find the correct alphabetical order, using a grammar book or a
dictionary, and confirm it with editors in that language.
3. Submit a ticket to CLDR.
4. Add a file with an alphabet, like the Bashkir file above, to MediaWiki
core.
5. Get it reviewed, merged, and deployed.
6. Deploy the change to the projects in that language.
7. Run a script that converts the categories to the new collation.
(Steps 5 and 6 sound repetitive because it needs to explicitly enabled for
each wiki. I filed another bug [4], which suggests defining a default
collation per language, so that step 6 won't be needed.)
If anybody has better suggestions about working with CLDR and ICU and
getting them to add and release these collation files faster, I'll be very
happy to hear them.
[1] http://bit.ly/2sWLJaX
[2] http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/10195
[3] For the confirmation about Bashkir see
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T162823 .
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164985
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Hi,
(Cross-posting, because this can interest subscribers of several focused
mailing lists. This doesn't need much discussion on the mailing lists, and
the linked talk page can be used if any discussion is needed.)
Many wikis in the Wikimedia world give editors suggestions about the
correct usage of each respective language: orthography, register,
punctuation, and so on.
I started a page to list of such language guides:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_guides
I added a bunch of links to Hebrew there because that's my home wiki. I
also added a few pages that I could find for Catalan, Indonesian, Russian,
and Bosnian.
Please add your languages there! Surely there are dozens and dozens of
missing links there.
Before you ask: The linked page explains why Wikidata is not very
convenient for maintaining such a list, but if you think that you can put
this nicely in Wikidata, be bold.
Thank you!
Also thanks to whoever maintains the Wikipedia Indonesia Twitter account
(@idwiki) for giving me the idea for starting this page!
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore