[Foundation-l] Automatic username transliteration for SUL

[David Gerard]

On 21/12/06, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> So, if the homograph attack and idiot user problem is largely solved,
> the main remaining problem appears to be accommodation of users who do
> not have the right fonts installed.


Note, by the way, that you can't even cut and paste a lot of Unicode
reliably, as I found out recently trying to write an Uncyclopedia
article (using the Wikia version of MediaWiki, which is pretty close
to Wikimedia's) which contained a burst of deliberately-gibberish
Unicode in the middle of Latin text [1].

This was on Seamonkey on Windows XP, and I had to experiment with
cut'n'paste to get it to work at all without stripping high bits or
turning the lot into "???????". I eventually did it by cutting from a
text box and pasting to another text box. Copy-and-paste from the
rendered wiki page did not work on this system.

Any solution must be able to accomodate system configurations that
make up a noticeable fraction of the userbase, even if they are
hopelessly broken by design, e.g. Windows XP English. A tooltip won't
make it possible to *use* the username, only to view it. And despite
GerardM's claims otherwise, we can't reasonably demand all en:wp
admins run something sensible like Ubuntu because he claims user-ID
numbers working would be dehumanising.


- d.

[1] http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/UnNews:Supreme_Court_declares_global_warming_unconstitutional