Last modified: 2011-01-25 00:32:58 UTC

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Bug 17428 - Implementing the diacritics switching at Romanian Wikipedia
Implementing the diacritics switching at Romanian Wikipedia
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Internationalization (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Lowest enhancement (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
http://ro.wikipedia.org
:
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2009-02-09 22:22 UTC by Michał Pietrusiński
Modified: 2011-01-25 00:32 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Michał Pietrusiński 2009-02-09 22:22:31 UTC
Due to an old mistake in Unicode, Romanian diacritics appear incorrectly as ş and ţ (with cedille) instead of ș and ț (with coma). However, as the corect letters become more and more popular, we would like to have a tool similar to the one used at the Serbian Wikipedia, which would switch the letters on request. It is not yet possible to replace the old diacritics with the new ones due to the fact that many users see them as if they were squares, but many users of our community prefer to see and use the new letters. In the place of "cirilica / latinica" at the button in the Serbian Wikipedia, there might be a text of a kind "diacritice noi" (to show the text with new diacritics) and "diacritice vechi" (to switch back to the old ones). I hope it is not a problem.
Comment 1 Siebrand Mazeland 2009-02-10 00:29:02 UTC
Isn't this an issue that should be resolved at the Unicode level, instead of as a hack on MediaWiki (or even more narrow as the bug states "on the Romanian language Wikipedia") level?
Comment 2 Bogdan Stancescu 2009-02-10 09:37:42 UTC
In the end, yes. But for now, native support for those Unicode characters is only provided in Windows Vista and similarly recent operating systems from other vendors. Windows XP does provide limited support for the new characters as well starting with SP2, although it typically renders them using a specific font (the result being that text looks a bit awkward -- "crâșmăriță" for instance would highlight the issue for Windows XP users; compare "crâşmăriţă"). Older operating systems from Microsoft do not provide support at all for the proper symbols. What's more, Windows Vista is the first operating system from Microsoft that provides native support for writing using these symbols.

Given all of the above, many of us in the Romanian community think that full transition to the correct diacritical signs is premature at this point. However, I believe we could reach consensus for a solution like the one shown here, sooner rather than later; in addition, this will most probably be an intermediary step at some point anyway.
Comment 3 Niklas Laxström 2009-02-12 16:59:08 UTC
Can't this be done as a simple JavaScript gadget?
Comment 4 Siebrand Mazeland 2009-02-14 23:30:06 UTC
Advising to close as invalid, or chancing the scope to Wikimedia/Something.
Comment 5 Niklas Laxström 2009-04-07 08:27:03 UTC
1) We have no man power to do this.
2) Transliteration has its own problems.
3) Unless the new keyboards are producing only the correct ones, the old ones could be converted to new ones using JavaScript gadget.
4) If we enabled the conversion in MediaWiki, it would be very hard to get it turned off some day.
5) This is likely to affect every existing website, in which case more general solution should be done.

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