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.
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.
No, that's rather minor issue, but it should be fixed too.
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).
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.
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.
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.