[Wikipedia-l] Re: One Wikipedia - two scripts

Tue Oct 12 08:42:20 UTC 2004

Hi Mark and everybody,

Yes, Tahoma works (but is ugly and therefore not used on ar: for 
example) and is even more widespread than Unikurd Web. I just tried it 
on http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fontexample. The words there 
should look similar with the only difference being the diacriticals.

I have not expressed myself correctly. The problem was not only the 
font, but the fact one cannot tell Wikipedia to use one font throughout 
an article if there are headings and lists. For the page name it doesn't 
work anyway. Something I forgot to mention was the edit window, words 
appear differently in the edit window and on the page or in the preview.

An automatic script converter would be a fine thing, but there are also 
dialect differences. So an article in the two main dialects Kurmanci and 
Sorani would exist four times after automatic conversion into both 
scripts. At the moment we have three dialects represented which are only 
partly mutually intellegible. Until now all Sorani is written in arabic 
letter, all Kurmanci and Zazaki in latin letter with links to each other 
if the same article exists in different dialects. We like it that way, 
there were no objections yet.

But because arabic and latin script are used for either of them, 
automatic script conversion would be fine on the long run. Technically 
it should be possible, as far as I know 1:1 conversion is possible.

Erdal