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%99zyczn…
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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