[Wikipedia-l] Will wikipedia.org in Hebrew, Arabic etc be registered?

[Neil Harris]

Tomer Chachamu wrote:

>"Wikipedia" in Hebrew: xn--7dbcbqab9ewa.org
>"Wikipedia" in Arabic: (I'm guessing) is xn--mgbbv2fyambbb.org (I took
>this from the Main Page in Arabic; it's the text in quotes)
>
>Are there plans to register these domains? What about Japanese, etc, etc?
>
>Is Punycode even commonly used in the countries of those languages? I
>know that in Israel it is common to see latinised domains
>(http://www.shesh.co.il http://www.walla.co.il http://www.nana.co.il
>etc) instead of domains in Unicode.
>
>Internet Explorer does not appear to support Punycode.
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
>  
>
The magic term is "IDN": Punycode is only part of the implementation of 
internationalized domain names. Firefox currently does support IDN. This 
is subject to change in the near term as security policies are worked 
on. However, by later this year, I expect that IDN support will be solid 
on at least Firefox, and perhaps IE, as Microsoft is forced to play 
catch-up.

I would certainly recommend registering the names as soon as possible, 
before someone else does.

-- Neil