On 10 Jan 2003 at 0:03, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 12:42:53PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
If it realy doesn't work, try upgrading your browser.
This is a totally wrong-headed way to look at things. Most net users have out-of-date browsers and we shouldn't expect them to upgrade to the latest version of their browser just to write articles. /Very/ unWiki.
There's NOTHING wrong with it. UTF-8 isn't any new technology and every browser that's not really ancient or really broken supports that.
If we wanted "every ancient broken browser", then we shouldn't use PNG, CSS, JavaScript, OGG, colors, and all things like that in articles, because there's always some ancient broken browser that doesn't support that. In fact all these are more likely to cause problems than UTF-8.
So the problem might be finding out what the standard for the browser in some parts of the world is and... write for the browser slightly below the standard. The policy "share your knowledge with the Wikipedia with all the high technology that we have" is what makes me thinking what this all Wikipedias are for...?
On Polish Wikipedia the policy is - if word is in Latin-based script, it should be spelled in Latin characters with all diactrics, and if it's not, original spelling (be it Cyrillic, Kanji or whatever else) should be given in article.
Mind you thou Tomasz, that there's no consensus on Polish Wikipedia on exeception: how to deal with words in Latin-based scripts which have popular or established Polish way of writing them without diactrics. So your sentence gave only first approximation of the policy and was lacking sth. The working copy of the policy and the ratio can be found, unfortunately in Polish language only at: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Zasady_pisowni_nazw_obcoj%C4%99zyczny...
If "screw the spelling" is not, as is widely thought now, just a temporary technical problem, but an oficial policy, then sooner or later you will see a fork of English Wikipedia.
Let's hope that ancient browsers extinct sooner.
In short, for now at least, the benefits of using UTF for Latin-based Wikipedias are over-shadowed by the negative repercussions.
It's completely opposite. "Problems" of UTF-8, coming from broken and ancient browsers, are completely irrelevant compared to benefits of being able to write thing correctly.
For people with direct access to the Internet, living in the so called Western World it is a "big" benefit. For people living in other parts of the world without all the "very" high technology, using some kind of "lower" high technology and using future off-line version of Wikipedia it might not be Both of us are happy because we've got the knowledge how to make our computers and our browsers deal with UTF-8. Other people who just to want to read free encyclopedia, might not be as happy as we are - just watching some broken texts. Some people in this world prefer basic knowledge over nice look.
By the way: what about accessability issue and all the unexpected non-latin characters and strange diactrics?
Youandme
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