[Wikimediaindia-l] Lower user and edit count of some Indian wikis

[Hari Prasad Nadig]

On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 10:05 +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> When you say "there are technical barriers", what technical barriers?
> We have for instance been working hard on getting a better
> localisation framework. BetaWiki is clearly superior. It now shows
> pointers to what a message is used for. It allows for the use of
> "gettext" files. I am really happy to see that for several languages
> from the Indian subcontinent this has been taken up. Consequently the
> use of Commons has been improved because the user interface of these
> languages is improving. I have noticed Bengali, Gujarati among, I have
> failed to notice Hindi for instance. 
> 
> What other technical barriers are there that we can help with? I have
> read in mailing lists that not enough complaints are received from
> Asia and consequently developers are not aware about issues. In one
> instance there was an issue with performance and once this was
> noticed, the performance in Asia is said to have increased
> substantially as a result. 
> 
> Thanks,
>      GerardM

Gerard,

   The technical barriers for users are with respect to input
(keying-in) in respective languages and reading them on their computers.
There are several old standards in place to which people are accustomed
to. Since we use Unicode on Wikis, it takes time for people to get
accustomed to the new encoding (for them), new setup in terms of
software they use on their machines. 

   There are rendering issues on Operating Systems, issues with default
fonts provided on Operating Systems. The problems are far beyond
localisation - in fact localisation of interface is not an issue at all
presently. 

   Let us discuss these in detail sometime on a separate thread. 

Cheers,

   - Hari Prasad