At 08:10 -0400 2008-07-25, Jimmy Wales wrote:
If there are people who are simply unable to upgrade or able but don't know how, I think we should find a way to accomodate them while at the same time encouraging them to upgrade.
I see. For how long?
Everything should be stored in a Unicode-5.1 compliant way, and then input method used for those on older systems should strictly enforce this.
I understand. Certainly the same problem has been encountered in India. But on the Tamil Wikipedia, for instance, where there are also many legacy fonts and those are not being supported, as far as I can see.
h t t p : / / t a . w i k i p e d i a . o r g / w i k i / µ ø ï Õ ï ø Õ ¿ ü ø Ø æ : F o n t _ h e l p
(If that doesn't work, google "tamil wikipedia" and select the 4th link down which says "Font help".)
This is a question of effectiveness. Is it more effective to simply switch to a system on Wikipedia that many people are unable to use at all, or is it more effective to get those people involved in writing content that will be valuable for the future while teaching and educating them (and turning them into sales people for upgrading!)?
I see your point, though in terms of Zawgyi we have a body of people who philosophically refuse to upgrade.
I will say this much, though: allowing people to use an input method which "breaks" anything is absolutely something I would oppose, because that would create more work later. So I think we agree on that part.
We do.
The part where we may not agree is in the area of: what do we tell people on the site who do not have a system which can do things in the modern way?
- Go away, you have an old computer - not welcoming
- Go to this other site and work in the old
way, make friends with a different community, do work that probably replicates work done on the real site, etc. - the worst possibility, because we will never unite the communities in the end, trust me, I know about this
I daresay you do.
- Welcome! Here is how you can input using
your old system, but really you should upgrade. Please upgrade. Here is how. Please upgrade. You can keep doing this for now but it is old-fashioned. Please upgrade.
I take your point. For inputting. People will still need compliant software to display the compliant fonts, and as you say, Andrew and I agree on how that should be managed.