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.
The only major issue I see with UTF support deals with
interlanguage links but there are already plans being
worked-out to have these links outside the main
content window of articles. Therefore the main content
window can be in the charset that is best for that
particular language Wikipedia and the interlanguage
link edit window can be in UTF.
Most browsers can deal with Latin-charset-based accent
marks so this isn't such a big issue anymore. BTW
everyone should be writing in the language of their
Wikipedia. French articles should be in French,
English articles in English, Spanish articles in
Spanish (unless most common usage of the term is to
use the foreign spelling). Yes this means that the
titles of articles are often approximated to fit
within the language you are writing when the two
languages have different alphabets. Most important
terms have more or less widely-used latin-based
approximations. All the less important terms have to
be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Wiktionary is UTF though (and rightly so since all
words in all languages are the subjects of articles).
In the encyclopedias, however, the subjects are not
the words, but persons, places, things and ideas (the
names are for indexing purposes only - so that the
information about the subjects can be found by the
target audience). So providing access to your target
audience is more important than using a zillion
different alphabets (just how the subject's name looks
in another language can be expressed in the article
using Unicode).
In short, for now at least, the benefits of using UTF
for Latin-based Wikipedias are over-shadowed by the
negative repercussions.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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