[Wikipedia-l] Two scripts/directions in one Wiki?

[Erdal Ronahi]

Hi,

We at the Kurdish Wikipedia/Wiktionary have the (maybe unique) problem, 
that Kurdish is not only written with two different alphabets (latin and 
arabic-based), but that these two scripts are written in different 
directions. I am looking for technical support here before I post 
anything as a feature request to the bugtracker.

While the majority of all articles is (and probably will be) left to 
right, often both directions are needed on one page, while some can be 
entirely right-to-left. Until now, noone has proposed to split the 
Wikipedia, on the contrary we want to include both scripts and provide 
optimal usability for both. Following are some problems for the 
right-to-left support:

*Page titles are partially incorrectly displayed, because all browsers 
interpret left-to-right words different that left-to-right paragraphs
*Lists appear incorrectly. Example: 
http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D9%87%E2%80%8C%D8%B4%D8%A7%D9%86%DB%8E%D9%86_%D8%B3%DB%8C
*Font problems.

The main problem seems to be that it is not possible to define a whole 
page as right-to-left. After a lot of trying we found a patial solution. 
Pages that are RTL use a template with a <div>-tag with a .rtl-class. 
This works, but it is a suboptimal solution, especially because a 
newcomer who wants to write RTL faces problems.

A solution would be something that defines whole pages as RTL, optimal 
would be a connection with the pagename: when the pagetitle is in arabic 
script, the page content should be RTL.

I would be glad about any help on the issue.

Greetings,
Erdal