On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 04:28:32AM -0500, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Peter Gervai wrote:
Could you point us to the page and revision of the
problem?
couple examples:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.o...
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&diff=20132&ol...
This happens on meta's Main Page often. Ask
Anthere and Erik for other
examples.
I see. First is not a good example, Opera 5 is _ancient_, you can't expect that anyone would support it, as upgrading is clearly painless.
This is NOT true. I tried upgrading to Opera 6, and it was unworkable, because it needed to much memory for my computer to handle it. Sure enough, I did not break anything any more, but the browser had great slowliness, and crashed on average every 30 mn. This is not precisely what I call *painless*
I kept it for a while, just to edit meta page, then gave up because it was just too much hassle.
The upgrade is perfectly ok if you have a recent computer. But you cannot expect every user to have so. There was a big campaign about 4 years ago in France, and many many people bought some imacs. I doubt very much the casual user just bought a brand new computer since then. Except for wikipedia, I did not meet any problem with it, fine for power, fine for dvd, fine for internet. Just problem on wikipedia. And I bought a boosted one.
I know it is not possible for these users to use Opera 6, and not possible to switch to system X.
Second example is indeed valid, but it isn't a
problem >for you: if the page does not contain non-8859-1 >characters, nothing gets garbled. If it
does contain others then, well, you *need* utf-8 on that page anyway. (Embed codes are a little bit slow to type, don't you agree? If not, write your reply manually by using embeds. :))
I do not understand that comment.
French people suggested they could just by hand correct broken caracters. This is not an option I fear
I just made an example : this is what appear after my edit : http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine
Can you figure manually correcting each time after a user ?
I have the plain answer : I saw a couple of reaction on meta to my destructive edits; I was just reverted; I know very well that if we switch to utf-8 on all wikipedias without a technical tweak to automatically insure "translation", the user of this browser, perhaps just a mother at home with a 4 years old imac, perhaps a student in Algeria, perhaps a kid in Brasil, will just be kicked out.
Perhaps is it just 2%, and perhaps those editing wikipedia right now are people technically better equipped that the average human being connected to internet, and perhaps we just do not want to keep it that way, and perhaps we want liberty and openess. Depends on what is important.
I understand your problem, it is valid, and that's probably the reason it's topic on wikitech. Still I believe we can expect editors to use non-ancient browsers (remember, reading is not a problem).
But perhaps we do not want to exclude these people from editing ?
As far as I know most browsers handle this very well (including, for example, unix character mode browsers).
And perhaps most users know nothing about unix
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