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]]