Leonard Vertighel wrote:
on the Italian Wikipedia it has recently been discussed to make a bot that is used for some maintenance work additionally convert characters like letters with accents to HTML-entities (è etc.). Does this make any sense? And if so, why was it.wikipedia converted to UTF-8 at all? And finally, if this really makes sense, shouldn't this be handled by the software instead of cluttering the edit window with &foobar;s that most people don't even understand?
I'm not sure I can follow your train of thought, but:
1) whether or not you use such a bot is an issue relevant to your local Wikipedia, so there should be a vote on it there, and; 2) whether or not you use such a bot is independent of whether or not the Italian Wikipedia uses UTF-8.
The Italian Wikipedia, just like all other smaller Wikipedias, was converted to UTF-8 to allow you to enter more characters than just the dreadfully limited Latin-1. With UTF-8, users can enter Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese/Japanese, Hebrew, etc.etc.etc. Switching from Latin-1 to UTF-8 *only* introduces extra possibilities, and imposes no limitation, so it's not even a trade-off.
It has been argued that those characters can't be entered directly e.g. with an American keyboard layout, but in my opinion this is at best a reason for converting the entities to the corresponding characters, not the other way round.
Firstly, you are right. Secondly, the argument isn't even valid. Just because some people can't enter an è because they use such a limited keyboard layout (which is their own fault), doesn't mean all instances of è need to be changed into è ... nor does it mean anything else of the kind, really.
(Personally, I wouldn't even mind a wiki syntax for entering special characters, but one that is replaced with the real character upon save, and if we do that, we might as well replace è etc. with è etc.)
(Incidentally, I've just thought of a way for people to enter the è properly if they know that its HTML code is è. Just use the preview and then copy & paste it back into the edit box. :) )
If this has already been discussed, could someone please point me to the relevant pages/threads.
I'm not aware of any past instance of this crackpot theory. ;-)
Timwi