Hoi,
What I am saying is that this is something that is our power to solve. It is
not the only issue but this is something that is easy to solve,
Thanks,
Gerard
2009/7/17 Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>
Are you saying that if we had better font support for
African
languages, they would not languish anymore? I do think it is a
necessary step but it is only the start. The reasons most of our
African language projects remain in such a state are manifold, in my
view.
Also - and perhaps this remains unknown to many - it seems to me that
most Indigenous American languages on Wikipedia that have noticed any
significant growth are built all by hobbyists with poor to mediocre
command of the language, filling those Wikis with thousands of pages,
and in the past they were even writing a good deal of the content in
Spanish.
The fact that we allow almost anybody who volunteers to take near
total control of a project in the absence of a community is not among
our strongest attributes. For example, Jose77 - who does not even
speak Uyghur by his own admission - overtook the Uyghur Wikipedia for
awhile and based on personal vendetta converted most everything to
Latin script, when Arabic is by far the most used script for the
language. It remains heavily filled with Latin script content.
The Nahuatl Wikipedia is still dominated by non-indigenous hobbyists,
who fill the posts of administrators and most prolific editors.
My view on such things has always been a minimalist approach - seeing
an empty Wiki can be discouraging, so it's nice to put a little
content there if you have some basic ability in a language so that
others may feel more welcome. For example, at the Navajo Wikipedia I
created around 100 bare-bones pages based on my rudimentary knowledge
of the language, hoping that someone else would come around later and
add more; in comparison, many of these people seem to be preoccupied
with article counts, looking to create thousands of stubs in what very
well could be completely nonsensical to a native speaker.
In some cases, my approach seemed to work very well. In a handful of
others, it appears to have been less successful - the native speaking
editor who has come to one Wikipedia has been following my "example"
of making pages that have a single sentence and an illustration,
rather than expanding upon existing pages or creating longer new pages
and did not respond to the message I left him.
Mark
On 7/17/09, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
Downloadable fonts have a much bigger application. Many of the African
Wikipedias languish because of a lack of support for extended Latin
characters. The people from ANLOC are happy to help us assess where
MediaWiki does not support these languages. This does affect whole wikis
and
it is one technical reason that can be solved why
many of our African
projects languish.
Thanks,
GerardM
http://www.africanlocalisation.net/
2009/7/16 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)gmail.com>
> Hi,
>
> I am proofreading Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar [1] on the English
Wikisource.
>
> It uses intricate formatting and for proper display of Biblical Hebrew
it
> needs a font which isn't installed on
most people's computers.
> Fortunately,
> this font, called Ezra SIL SR, is Free Software, released under the Open
> Font License.[2]
>
> Some modern browsers, such as Firefox 3.5 are able to render
downloadable
> fonts in a way that is consistent with draft
CSS 3 standard. Would it be
> possible to upload such a free font to Wikimedia servers and let people
> who
> use modern browsers, but don't have the font on their computer, enjoy
the
> book with proper fonts without bothering with
installing new fonts?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> [1] (
>
>
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Gesenius%27_Hebrew_Grammar_%281910_Kaut…
> )
> [2] (
>
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=silhebrunic2
)
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
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