Hi Wikimedians in India,
Recently i've been making improvements to the enhanced editing toolbar, and especially to its "Special Characters" functionality.
The enhanced editing toolbar should be enabled for most of you, but in case it isn't, go to "My Preferences" -> "Editing" and check "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" and "Enable dialogs for inserting links, tables and more" under "Usability features".
Can you please take a look at the toolbar and tell me whether it has the features needed for your language? It would be really useful if you could check these things: * When you are using the toolbar in the English Wikipedia, is the "Special characters" section useful for adding characters in your language, for example if you want to add an Indian name? Does it have all the required characters, including letters, vowels and punctuation marks? Do the fonts work? Are the characters added correctly to the editing field? * When you are using the toolbar in the Wikipedia in your language, does it provide all the needed functionality as well as in the English Wikipedia?
If you experience any problems, please tell me and indicate the versions of the browser and the operating system.
Thank you,
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 14:46, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il
wrote:
Hi Wikimedians in India,
Recently i've been making improvements to the enhanced editing toolbar, and especially to its "Special Characters" functionality.
Great!
Tamil isn't there in the extension, but I have some feedback / questions.
Does this aim to replace on-screen-keyboard? IMHO its highly unfriendly to type a name/anything for that matter using it. Its best suited for the purpose it intended for, i.e "Special Characters" and should not contain entire char set(at least when Narayam is available, that should predominantly be the input method). It would be suitable to have actual special characters which either don't have key mappings on Narayam / other standard input methods or those which people don't use frequently and hence might not remember. Example, I would like Tamil numerals[1] which lack a way in most input methods to be on this toolbar rather than the entire Tamil char set.
I see Telugu, Bengali already have their char set, and Marathi filed a bug[2], but the list of languages / order isn't configurable per project, which means if Marathi gets added tomorrow, they have to scroll down the list and is unlikely to be very usable at least in Marathi projects since few people may scroll down and use it to input.
Other than being a first class citizen and being up within the editor, what difference does this have against Mediawiki:Edittools ?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Script#Numerals_and_symbols [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/35112
2012/3/31 Srikanth Lakshmanan srik.lak@gmail.com:
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 14:46, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hi Wikimedians in India,
Recently i've been making improvements to the enhanced editing toolbar, and especially to its "Special Characters" functionality.
Great!
Tamil isn't there in the extension, but I have some feedback / questions.
It was built into the editing toolbar with the release of the Vector skin in early 2010. I don't really know how were the scripts and the characters chosen for inclusion back then, but evidently it's not perfect.
If you want to add Tamil, please open a bug about it or just patch WikiEditor/modules/jquery.wikiEditor.toolbar.js
Does this aim to replace on-screen-keyboard?
Absolutely not. If anything, an on-screen keyboard will replace this toolbar for most uses, although the toolbar will probably remain as a simple "last resort" thing. It should be (kinda) complete and usable, but it's not supposed to be perfectly convenient.
It would be suitable to have actual special characters which either don't have key mappings on Narayam / other standard input methods or those which people don't use frequently and hence might not remember.
It's OK to have all the characters there and not just the very special characters, as long as the regular characters are not getting in the way the special characters too much. It's supposed to be useful for people who know what they want to type, but don't know how to type it.
For example, if you are comfortable typing Tamil using Narayam or a keyboard layout that your operating system provides, and you want to use this toolbar to type some rare Tamil characters that are not found in your usual layout, and it's inconvenient because it has too many characters and the character that you need is hard to find, then this is a bug that should be filed under the WikiEditor extension. (The example is of course imaginary, because Tamil is not supported at all.)
I see Telugu, Bengali already have their char set, and Marathi filed a bug[2],
Marathi is already supposed to be supported in the Devanagari section. If the Devanagari section is not good enough for Marathi, then it is a bug.
The bug to which you are pointing is proposing to use this toolbar in a very different way. That will be addressed in a different extension that is being designed now.
but the list of languages / order isn't configurable per project, which means if Marathi gets added tomorrow, they have to scroll down the list and is unlikely to be very usable at least in Marathi projects since few people may scroll down and use it to input.
It's useful to have all the languages in all the projects, although some customization may be convenient. For example, putting the scripts that are most useful for a certain project at the top. If anybody has ideas for that, then that's exactly the kind of thing that i want to hear.
Other than being a first class citizen and being up within the editor, what difference does this have against Mediawiki:Edittools ?
Edittools is too customizable - it doesn't offer anything out of the box. So every project that uses, has something different. Some projects copy the configuration from friendly projects (Ukrainian from Russian, for example). It's actually a very interesting process to learn, because it may tell a thing or two about the needs of every language. And of course, don't underestimate the "first class citizen" part :)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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