Disallowing invisible characters or cleaning them is a bad idea.

Invisible characters are actually heavily used in many languages including Persian (and part of the official manual of style of the language taught in schools) it is downright wrong to check and fix those in many wikis in those languages.

Also many wikis have titles in other languages such as wiktionaries or redirects in a different languages (For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86&redirect=no) which means removing ZWNJ or similar characters would be also unacceptable in English Wiktionary or English Wikipedia as well.

There are some exemptions though: Two invisible characters are wrong, or an invisible character at the end or beginning. But all of these are cases in Persian language and another language might actually allow that as well.

Best

Am Di., 17. Jan. 2023 um 12:48 Uhr schrieb Martin Domdey <dr.taxon@gmail.com>:

Thank you,

it seems that there's nobody working on it anymore, right?

Kind regards,
Martin ...

Am Di., 17. Jan. 2023 um 12:28 Uhr schrieb Andre Klapper <aklapper@wikimedia.org>:
Hi,

On Tue, 2023-01-17 at 12:03 +0100, Martin Domdey wrote:
> isn't it better to avoid invisible characters in page titles
> while creating the pages?
>
> Please look here, there has been problems with invisible characters
> working with it when parsing or page linking those page titles with
> invisible unicode
> characters: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer_Diskussion:Wurgl#L
> iste_der_Biografien/Ci

See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#UTF-8_ZERO_WIDTH_SPACE_in_page_title

> Instead of this there will never be a problem when invisible
> characters within the page title name will be deleted when
> creating the page.
>
> What do you think about it and what technical approaches do
> already exist? How are LTR and RTL marks dealt if creating pages with
> them?

See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/GDxAs4QdEDTG/#R
for related bugs, and a ticket about improving cleanupTitles.php.

Cheers,
andre
--
Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
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