On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 13:56:18 +0200, Leonard Vertighel
<leonard.vertighel(a)web.de> 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.).
It has been argued that those characters can't be entered directly e.g. with
an American keyboard layout...
It does seem the wrong way round to me. The edit box should be easy to
read, and HTML entities are not going to help that. If people have a
problem typing certain letters, it might be helpful to put a copy of
those into the [[it:MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning]] page. This is already
done on the Maori and German Wikipedias. See
http://mi.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning for example.
This means the letters are shown at the end of every edit page and can
be copied and pasted by those who can't type them on their keyboard.
I agree that Leonard's approach is the wrong way round. My inclination
when I see that kind of HTML entity is to replace it with the character.
The fact is that these *can* be enterred from the keyboard for the
languages of Western Europe, including Italian. I write regularly in
French and insteat of the è I simply use Alt + 0232 for รจ.
Ec