On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 03:59:34PM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote: Just see articles about anything Japanese on English Wikipedia. They contain Japanese names of everything.

On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 11:34:53PM -0800, Brion L. VIBBER wrote: Uhm, right. But most non-japanese people don't know names of too many kanjis, so kanjis aren't that important. ;) On the other hand more people that it is usually though know kana, so it might be beneficial for them. Hmmm. Now I think that some general method would be more useful: &katakana_a; &kanji_b; &hebrew_c; or &cyrilic_d; I think that it won't need too many changes in parser. Perl code: Init: %Entities = {'&katakana_o;' => 'オ', ... }; On HTML output: s/(&[a-zA-Z0-9_]+;)/$Entities{$x}?$Entities{$x}:$x;/eg; Hmmm. Wouldn't that need some modifications to browsers ?

Brion L. VIBBER wrote: Really? There are kanji in articles about Japan? I mean, articles other than articles about the language or other special cases? That seems odd to me. I'm not opposed to it, necessarily, but it seems very odd. I mean, there's no reason to expect that kanji will be useful to the vast majority of readers. Can you send some examples? --Jimbo

On ven, 2002-03-08 at 09:20, Jimmy Wales wrote: Yeeessss.... You have such a difficult time accepting this. :) Define "special cases". No, but there's no reason to expect that any particular *article* will be useful to the vast majority of readers for that matter. A few question marks or boxes in parentheses aren't going to drive non-Japanese readers mad with one look, but for those who *do* know it, they *do* get more information because they now can recognize the term in Japanese text, or usefully look it up in Japanese informational resources. The English wikipedia isn't just for English monolinguals, is it? Nagano, Japan Japan/Meiji Emperor Akihito of Japan Emperor Jimmu of Japan Satsuma Okinawa Hideki Tojo Tokyo Meiji-era leaders Shogun Koto Dejima Yen Tokugawa shoguns Kamakura shoguns Hanko Akihabara Samurai Cyprinus carpio Nintendo Nissan Ashikaga shoguns Kyoto Morihei Ueshiba Toyotomi Hideyoshi Jokichi Takamine Ju-jitsu Junichiro Koizumi World War II/Hiryu World War II/Kaga Iron Chef World War II/Soryu Akira Kurosawa Kamikaze World War II/Zuikaku Heisuke Hironaka Amakusa Tsurugi Raku Karaoke Kaifu Toshiki Toyota Tsunami Shibasaburo Kitasato Judo Gomoku Suzuki Kendo Zhu Shijie Isoroku Yamamoto Miyazaki Hayao Sushi Choshu Anime Otaku No Video The Vision of Escaflowne Kia Asayama Ghost in the Shell Tenchi Muyo Star Blazers Princess Mononoke Doraemon Hentai Masamune Shirow Manga My Neighbor Totoro Trigun Sailor Moon Ranma 1/2 Rumiko Takahashi I'm sure I missed plenty. These can be broadly categorized as: * Geographical names, with the local native kanji "spelling" as a sidenote * Personal names of politicians, scientists, and artists, with their native kanji "spelling" as a sidenote * Various cultural items originating in Japan (sushi, karaoke, martial arts, companies, works of art/pop culture) with their native kanji/kana "spelling" as a sidenote That said, I'm still not convinced there's much usefulness in more special codes that work on our wiki and nowhere else in the world; only a fraction of the above use kana at all. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On ven, 2002-03-08 at 10:26, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote: What are you doing, looking up every character individually? No wonder you're having trouble! What I currently do is to type the desired text into yudit (http://yudit.org) using its support for the kinput2 input method (or cut-n-paste into yudit from another web page), save the file, and run it through this little program: #!/usr/bin/perl -p # disassemble non-ASCII codes from UTF-8 stream # borrowed from http://czyborra.com/utf/ #$format=$ENV{"UCFORMAT"}||'<U%04X>'; $format='&#%d;'; s/([\xC0-\xDF])([\x80-\xBF])/sprintf($format, unpack("c",$1)<<6&0x07C0|unpack("c",$2)&0x003F)/ge; s/([\xE0-\xEF])([\x80-\xBF])([\x80-\xBF])/sprintf($format, unpack("c",$1)<<12&0xF000|unpack("c",$2)<<6&0x0FC0|unpack("c",$3)&0x003F)/ge; s/([\xF0-\xF7])([\x80-\xBF])([\x80-\xBF])([\x80-\xBF])/sprintf($format, unpack("c",$1)<<18&0x1C0000|unpack("c",$2)<<12&0x3F000| unpack("c",$3)<<6&0x0FC0|unpack("c",$4)&0x003F)/ge; Paste the output into the Wikipedia edit box, and presto! If I have one name, it gets done at once. If I have two names, they get done at once. If I put in a whole passage of text, it all gets done at once. It would actually be *more* work for me to separately write out the kana characters in special codes. Once we've got the new system with Unicode up, you should be able to type or paste the characters in directly (unless you have a very limited browser, see my earlier post) and bypass all this rigamarole. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On dim, 2002-03-10 at 04:34, Lars Aronsson wrote: Well, my point is that there is no need whatsoever to make these separate functions. They work 100% THE SAME WAY. You put in text, it munges it a bit to make non-ASCII characters behave, and searches for it. No images involved. No great hardship to the person who never types a kanji. (Or an o-with-umlaut!) No reason to make them separate. :) -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On ven, 2002-03-08 at 09:18, Jimmy Wales wrote: Bring up the wikipedia article on [[Miyazaki Hayao]] (or, for that matter, [[Sushi]]) for an example of what we're talking about. Kanji/kana are provided as supplementary parenthetical information, while the main text uses the English name and, if different, the Romaji form. What other special case could there be than "something originating in culture X, here's its real name in the language of X in case you can read X and want to look up more information or, heck, are just curious". -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)