[Foundation-l] Frustration with the conversion engines issue

[Ziko van Dijk]

Milos, thank you for the very comprehensive presentation of the problem.
There are other cases that could be mentioned, it is indeed a problem
touching most of the language editions.
I am sceptical about automatic conversion. As you said, it is mainly a
solution for reading, but not for writing, because the source text is in one
specific spelling or character system. As a result there are mainly two ways
to deal with that:
- a split of the Wikipedias into two; this is most likely when there are
other linguistic differences e.g. in dictionary.
- one variety has so much support in the linguistic community that the
minority is small and discouraged to create a Wikipedia of their own. In
that case automatic conversion is a nice conveniency, but as editors the
minority users more or less have to adapt to the majority.
Alas.
Kind regards
Ziko

2009/4/1 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>

> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> > It sounds like a good project for a directed grant. Have you tried
> > contacting potential grant-making organisations? I imagine some
> > awesome things could be done with as little as $100K.
>
> First, sorry for forgetting you. You were the only person which
> responded positively toward this idea :)
>
> I am thinking again about funding... Thanks for raising this idea into
> my mind again.
>
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde