Are you saying that if we had better font support for African languages, they would not languish anymore? I do think it is a necessary step but it is only the start. The reasons most of our African language projects remain in such a state are manifold, in my view.
Also - and perhaps this remains unknown to many - it seems to me that most Indigenous American languages on Wikipedia that have noticed any significant growth are built all by hobbyists with poor to mediocre command of the language, filling those Wikis with thousands of pages, and in the past they were even writing a good deal of the content in Spanish.
The fact that we allow almost anybody who volunteers to take near total control of a project in the absence of a community is not among our strongest attributes. For example, Jose77 - who does not even speak Uyghur by his own admission - overtook the Uyghur Wikipedia for awhile and based on personal vendetta converted most everything to Latin script, when Arabic is by far the most used script for the language. It remains heavily filled with Latin script content.
The Nahuatl Wikipedia is still dominated by non-indigenous hobbyists, who fill the posts of administrators and most prolific editors.
My view on such things has always been a minimalist approach - seeing an empty Wiki can be discouraging, so it's nice to put a little content there if you have some basic ability in a language so that others may feel more welcome. For example, at the Navajo Wikipedia I created around 100 bare-bones pages based on my rudimentary knowledge of the language, hoping that someone else would come around later and add more; in comparison, many of these people seem to be preoccupied with article counts, looking to create thousands of stubs in what very well could be completely nonsensical to a native speaker.
In some cases, my approach seemed to work very well. In a handful of others, it appears to have been less successful - the native speaking editor who has come to one Wikipedia has been following my "example" of making pages that have a single sentence and an illustration, rather than expanding upon existing pages or creating longer new pages and did not respond to the message I left him.
Mark
On 7/17/09, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Downloadable fonts have a much bigger application. Many of the African Wikipedias languish because of a lack of support for extended Latin characters. The people from ANLOC are happy to help us assess where MediaWiki does not support these languages. This does affect whole wikis and it is one technical reason that can be solved why many of our African projects languish. Thanks, GerardM
http://www.africanlocalisation.net/
2009/7/16 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com
Hi,
I am proofreading Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar [1] on the English Wikisource.
It uses intricate formatting and for proper display of Biblical Hebrew it needs a font which isn't installed on most people's computers. Fortunately, this font, called Ezra SIL SR, is Free Software, released under the Open Font License.[2]
Some modern browsers, such as Firefox 3.5 are able to render downloadable fonts in a way that is consistent with draft CSS 3 standard. Would it be possible to upload such a free font to Wikimedia servers and let people who use modern browsers, but don't have the font on their computer, enjoy the book with proper fonts without bothering with installing new fonts?
Thanks in advance.
[1] (
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Gesenius%27_Hebrew_Grammar_%281910_Kautz... ) [2] ( http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=silhebrunic2 )
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni
"We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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