[Foundation-l] supporting small languages (was WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism)

[phoebe ayers]

(changing the thread title)

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have proposed to spend 100,000,- Euro and this will make major
> improvements for the scripts, the fonts and the standards for the languages
> we have a Wikipedia for. This is given the current budget chicken feed.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM

This is not a comment on the amount of money but on the idea of
improvements to scripts/fonts/standards etc.

I understand there's been discussion about creating a list of problems
for representing various languages on the internet. For example, some
languages have problems being written online because they are not well
supported in Unicode, or some don't have free fonts, etc. etc.

These are problems for *any* website that wants to support that
particular language. There are also bugs related to how *we* support
particular languages in MediaWiki -- as far as I know these have
mainly been collected in Bugzilla.

So my questions are: 1) have there ever been any comprehensive lists
made of these language-related bugs (either within MediaWiki or in
general); and, 2) what needs to be done (technically) to support
small(er) languages?

(I know we, & in particular GerardM, have been discussing this for a
long time. But I'm curious what the current state of affairs is, and
if issues for small languages are collected together in one place).

best,
Phoebe