I hate to interrupt important matters of state with a trivial concern, but while I was in the Catalan wikipedia today I went to use the special characters in the copyright area of the edit page and only managed to invoke some gobbledygook. I ignored it at the time, but then found that it was doing the same thing in the Sicilian wikipedia. Has anyone else come across this? Has anyone got any tips? Have both the Catalan and the Sicilians gone awry somewhere along the way or is this universal? Appreciative of any helpful thoughts. Salutamu.
pippudoz
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On Jan 5, 2005, at 3:03 AM, Giuseppe DAngelo wrote:
I hate to interrupt important matters of state with a trivial concern, but while I was in the Catalan wikipedia today I went to use the special characters in the copyright area of the edit page and only managed to invoke some gobbledygook. I ignored it at the time, but then found that it was doing the same thing in the Sicilian wikipedia. Has anyone else come across this? Has anyone got any tips? Have both the Catalan and the Sicilians gone awry somewhere along the way or is this universal? Appreciative of any helpful thoughts. Salutamu.
Can you be more specific?
* What browser, operating system, versions are you using? * What exactly does this "gobbledygook" look like?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On 5 Jan 2005, at 14:18, Brion Vibber wrote:
What exactly does this "gobbledygook" look like?
Platoon,
As Gruppenfuhrerrr I mussst take exception to the "quoting out" of the word gobbledygook. This personal favorite of mine among all English words is a perfectly valid member of the club, as any decent dictionary will prove [http://gobbledygook.word.sytes.org/], and should not be discriminated against. Ai protest zis diskriminatshion in ze strongest possible terms ANT VILL DEFENT gobbledygook's honor of TO TEH DAETH!!!
Thank you. As you were, gentlemen.
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
PS: Gobbledygook. I like saying that. Gobbledygook. :-)
PPS: Actually, WordNet's entry is incomplete. From my work in (English language) IT telephone support, I recall that most contemporary Irish and UK business world PC users understand gobbledygook to mean "a bunch of garbled, seemingly random characters". (Which is what Giuseppe was referring to. But most of yers knew that anyway.)
Jens Ropers wrote:
PS: Gobbledygook. I like saying that. Gobbledygook. :-)
PPS: Actually, WordNet's entry is incomplete. From my work in (English language) IT telephone support, I recall that most contemporary Irish and UK business world PC users understand gobbledygook to mean "a bunch of garbled, seemingly random characters". (Which is what Giuseppe was referring to. But most of yers knew that anyway.)
According to Eric Partridge in "A Dictionary of Slang" it was coined in 1944 by Maury Maverick in the US for "pompous, long-winded,vague speech or writing, heavily laced with jargon." He apparently expanded on the idea in his 1952 book "Chamber of Horrors". (I don't have it, but it seems like a good enough reason to find a copy.) The verb "to gobble" was imitative of the sound made by a turkey.
Although my source does not make the connection in "Gobbledygook", "gook" has a proud tradition in American pejorative slang. During WWII it referred to the Japanese. At an earlier time iit had reference to the Philippino insurgents who dared to believe that the Spanish American War had anything to do with their gaining independence.
Ec
I got that in the ang.wikipedia.org while using, but I am using Firefox right now, and there's not a problem. Don't get me wrong, just about every piece of software I get I try to get Microsoft, but I have to use Firefox for the wiki...and I can use tabs to open multiple pages for editing at once. If IE had tabs, and could do the special characters, I'd go back though.
James
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Giuseppe DAngelo Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 12:04 PM To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: special characters
I hate to interrupt important matters of state with a trivial concern, but while I was in the Catalan wikipedia today I went to use the special characters in the copyright area of the edit page and only managed to invoke some gobbledygook. I ignored it at the time, but then found that it was doing the same thing in the Sicilian wikipedia. Has anyone else come across this? Has anyone got any tips? Have both the Catalan and the Sicilians gone awry somewhere along the way or is this universal? Appreciative of any helpful thoughts. Salutamu.
pippudoz
--------------------------------- Nuovo Yahoo! Messenger E' molto più divertente: Audibles, Avatar, Webcam, Giochi, Rubrica Scaricalo ora! _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Jan 5, 2005, at 11:29 AM, James R. Johnson wrote:
I got that in the ang.wikipedia.org while using, but I am using Firefox right now, and there's not a problem. Don't get me wrong, just about every piece of software I get I try to get Microsoft, but I have to use Firefox for the wiki...
It sounds like you might be using some version of Internet Explorer? If so, it might be on some version of Windows? That's more than I got out the previous poster, at least. :)
A quick test on ang.wikipedia.org in IE 6.0 on Windows XP SP2 shows that some of the two-byte UTF-8 characters are incorrectly URL-decoded by IE and are inserted as two characters composed of their individual UTF-8 bytes interpreted as 8-bit Latin-1 characters.
This is pretty clearly an incorrect interpretation of the code by IE. It can probably be worked around by skipping the URL encoding, but I'll have to do more testing for scripting-attack safety and compatibility in other browsers, so I don't have time to do it right now while I'm at work. Would you mind filing a bug report on bugzilla.wikipedia.org to make sure I don't forget? Thanks.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
It's already on bugzilla:
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247
Alfio
On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Brion Vibber wrote:
A quick test on ang.wikipedia.org in IE 6.0 on Windows XP SP2 shows that some of the two-byte UTF-8 characters are incorrectly URL-decoded by IE and are inserted as two characters composed of their individual UTF-8 bytes interpreted as 8-bit Latin-1 characters.
This is pretty clearly an incorrect interpretation of the code by IE. It can probably be worked around by skipping the URL encoding, but I'll have to do more testing for scripting-attack safety and compatibility in other browsers, so I don't have time to do it right now while I'm at work. Would you mind filing a bug report on bugzilla.wikipedia.org to make sure I don't forget? Thanks.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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