Hello all,
on the Italian Wikipedia it has recently been discussed to make a bot that is
used for some maintenance work additionally convert characters like letters
with accents to HTML-entities (è etc.). Does this make any sense? And
if so, why was it.wikipedia converted to UTF-8 at all? And finally, if this
really makes sense, shouldn't this be handled by the software instead of
cluttering the edit window with &foobar;s that most people don't even
understand?
It has been argued that those characters can't be entered directly e.g. with
an American keyboard layout, but in my opinion this is at best a reason for
converting the entities to the corresponding characters, not the other way
round.
Sorry for taking this here, but the thought of having soon thousands of pages
interspersed with cryptic entities was rather shocking for me ;-) and thus I
hope to find some expert answers as soon as possible. Just imagine what the
German and French Wikipedias, just to name those, would look like with lots
of ä ß ç and the like in the middle of words.
If this has already been discussed, could someone please point me to the
relevant pages/threads. Thank you,
[[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]
[[it:Utente:Leonard Vertighel]]