Hi,
Shortly after the Berlin meeting I promised to email the Language committee
about internationalization software updates, so here's the first one.
This one is about several recent and upcoming changes in the "Special
characters" toolbar, which is available in both source and visual editing.
In case you didn't know, to see in Visual Editing, click the "Ω" toolbar
button, and in source editing, click "Special characters".
Recently, Canadian Aboriginal characters were added to it. This was done by
TPT, a volunteer best known for contributions to the software on
Wikisource. The Canadian Aboriginal characters are in the end of the list,
for not particular reason—that's simply where TPT put them.
The reason TPT added them is that the Wikimedia Canada chapter is doing
some work with native languages of Canada. They were looking for somebody
to help them with that. I helped with
translatewiki.net configuration, and
TPT volunteered to help with the toolbar.
This possibly begs the question why aren't more writing systems there. For
example, Tamil is there, but why not Kannada or Armenian? I have no idea.
As far as I know, this toolbar was never properly planned, and characters
were added quite randomly. If anybody can suggest a good plan of adding
more scripts (but not too much, because it does waste bandwidth), I'll be
happy to hear it.
Another tiny change, which I just submitted for review is the addition of
single angle quotation marks (‹›) and angle brackets (⟨⟩) to the "Symbols"
area of the same toolbar. What other symbols can you think will be useful
there? (Maybe I should start by asking for a list of the most common
characters in Wikimedia projects to do it in a data-driven way...)
Thanks!
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore