Thanks for the responses about the unicode issues with en.wikipedia.org. Firefox has worked well so far, and I'm glad to hear the other wiki(s) will move to utf-8.

As regards the Maltese Wikipedia mt: , I'd like to offer some backstory. The Maltese wikipedia was 'founded' if you will around September 2004, (i.e. the first entries in the language were made). I had more or less forgotten about it - and a few other entries were made later that year. Then sometime early in 2005, the Maltese-language blogosphere started to pick up steam. I began looking at the Wikipedia again, and started following the steps to set it up properly. Fueled by blog links, the number of authors on the Maltese wikipedia grew to staggering proportions - about five or six active contributors.

In Malta, I've noticed that some things are easier done in person. Plus, being such friendly people and a small island, meeting together is a natural way to continue something. As I was going to be visiting, I started putting notes up actually about a week before the meeting date. We took votes (in WIki style) and were able to hash out a meeting time eventually. Venue was to be an famous outdoor cafe in the main square that has wifi access.. however, it was raining and so it started indoors. The cafe staff complained, however - not about AC power usage, but about computers interfering with the cash register (!).. so it moved outdoors when the rain stopped. This was better, as WiFi didn't work inside and I had not managed to grab copies of the pages we wanted to discuss.

Five people came in total, two of which aren't yet active contributors but should be soon. We talked about orthography issues (always a popular and recurring topic in any language I think), tasks to do, organizational issues, POV, categories. Several of the action items have been completed already.

Yes, it will be interesting to see how things develop. Sometimes being on a small island has its advantages, logistically. I think there is some interest in meeting once in a while - at the very least I will try to organize something myself when I next visit, probably in a year.

I think some policies etc are still being hashed out, after which mt: will be ready for a new phase in promotion.

One must also realize that a standard keyboard for this language was only finalized in 2002, and has only seen adoption recently. Maltese orthography as such has been around since 1921, but until very recently a lot of data has been encoded using special fonts and not Unicode.

Saħħa lilkom (health to all) Steven