[WikiEN-l] Tagging foreign language text with templates

[Ray Saintonge]

Matthew Brown wrote:

>On 5/14/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phare_de_la_Vieille&diff=130494303&oldid=130474199
>>
>>Is there any consensus for this? Seems like a massive blow to readable
>>wikitext for not much benefit.
>>    
>>
>People have been doing this to Japanese for a while - see {{nihongo}}.
>That is arguably useful in that Japanese-language names need to be
>transliterated in order to be readable, let alone comprehensible, to
>most English readers, 
>
So transliterate them unless there is already an established English 
form.  The purpose of original script is for people to be able to follow 
the matter up in that language.  An interwiki link to the WP in that 
language or to Wiktionary would at least have some usefulness.

>and a standard format for putting the different
>forms is nice.
>
Why?

>The point of this template is that it marks up the language used so
>that it can be displayed or spoken correctly.  It encloses it in <span
>lang="language"></span> tags.
>
It just puts tags around it.  How is that going to get things pronounced 
"correctly".  Is that even needed?  Do we tag mathematical or musical 
expressions for proper pronunciation?

>It's important to note that Unicode does not encode the language, just
>the characters.  
>
That's as it should be.

>Read up on [[Han unification]] to understand the
>problems this gives with characters deemed the same across multiple
>Asian languages even if the characters are actually written quite
>differently when used to write Japanese vs. Chinese, for instance.
>
In situations where this matters the people involved already have a 
reasonable knowledge of the language(s) involved.

>There are less glaring examples stylistically in a number of European
>languages (exact positioning and style of diacritics, for instance).
>
>As well as display/typography issues not handled in Unicode, this also
>allows screen readers and the like to have a better chance of
>understanding words in different languages.
>
Wikipedia is not a dictionary.

>It's certainly neater than using the HTML, but it's not exactly 100%
>intuitive either.  I'm torn on this one; the more complicated Wiki
>markup becomes, the less friendly it is, but on the other hand, it's
>not good to lose information either.
>
Our markups are already overcomplicated.  The last thing we need is more 
geekish imperialism.  Omitting this does not lose any notable 
information at all. If all details in an article would go to this level 
of minutiae all of them would be much longer and much more boring. 

Ec