Hi,

Shortly after the Berlin meeting I promised to email the Language committee about internationalization software updates, so here's the first one.

This one is about several recent and upcoming changes in the "Special characters" toolbar, which is available in both source and visual editing. In case you didn't know, to see in Visual Editing, click the "Ω" toolbar button, and in source editing, click "Special characters".

Recently, Canadian Aboriginal characters were added to it. This was done by TPT, a volunteer best known for contributions to the software on Wikisource. The Canadian Aboriginal characters are in the end of the list, for not particular reason—that's simply where TPT put them.

The reason TPT added them is that the Wikimedia Canada chapter is doing some work with native languages of Canada. They were looking for somebody to help them with that. I helped with translatewiki.net configuration, and TPT volunteered to help with the toolbar.

This possibly begs the question why aren't more writing systems there. For example, Tamil is there, but why not Kannada or Armenian? I have no idea. As far as I know, this toolbar was never properly planned, and characters were added quite randomly. If anybody can suggest a good plan of adding more scripts (but not too much, because it does waste bandwidth), I'll be happy to hear it.

Another tiny change, which I just submitted for review is the addition of single angle quotation marks (‹›) and angle brackets (⟨⟩) to the "Symbols" area of the same toolbar. What other symbols can you think will be useful there? (Maybe I should start by asking for a list of the most common characters in Wikimedia projects to do it in a data-driven way...)

Thanks!

-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬