If we ever get an integrated spellcheck, it will need these tags; they
are also valuable during automatic translation if the translator is
sufficiently sophisticated to recognize them (and not try to translate
into the target language).
But there should be a visually less prominent way of doing it. For one
thing, they shouldn't be recognized as links--that's really worthless
when they just link to the language. I have my skin set for blue, but
for those using red or underlining it must be really awful. DGG
On 5/15/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Matthew Brown wrote:
On 5/14/07, Steve Bennett
<stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phare_de_la_Vieille&diff=1304…
Is there any consensus for this? Seems like a massive blow to readable
wikitext for not much benefit.
People have been doing this to Japanese for a while - see {{nihongo}}.
That is arguably useful in that Japanese-language names need to be
transliterated in order to be readable, let alone comprehensible, to
most English readers,
So transliterate them unless there is already an established English
form. The purpose of original script is for people to be able to follow
the matter up in that language. An interwiki link to the WP in that
language or to Wiktionary would at least have some usefulness.
and a standard format for putting the different
forms is nice.
Why?
The point of this template is that it marks up the
language used so
that it can be displayed or spoken correctly. It encloses it in <span
lang="language"></span> tags.
It just puts tags around it. How is that going to get things pronounced
"correctly". Is that even needed? Do we tag mathematical or musical
expressions for proper pronunciation?
It's important to note that Unicode does not
encode the language, just
the characters.
That's as it should be.
Read up on [[Han unification]] to understand the
problems this gives with characters deemed the same across multiple
Asian languages even if the characters are actually written quite
differently when used to write Japanese vs. Chinese, for instance.
In situations where this matters the people involved already have a
reasonable knowledge of the language(s) involved.
There are less glaring examples stylistically in a
number of European
languages (exact positioning and style of diacritics, for instance).
As well as display/typography issues not handled in Unicode, this also
allows screen readers and the like to have a better chance of
understanding words in different languages.
Wikipedia is not a dictionary.
It's certainly neater than using the HTML, but
it's not exactly 100%
intuitive either. I'm torn on this one; the more complicated Wiki
markup becomes, the less friendly it is, but on the other hand, it's
not good to lose information either.
Our markups are already overcomplicated. The last thing we need is more
geekish imperialism. Omitting this does not lose any notable
information at all. If all details in an article would go to this level
of minutiae all of them would be much longer and much more boring.
Ec
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