Leonard Vertighel 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.). Does this make any sense? And
if so, why was it.wikipedia converted to UTF-8 at all? And finally, if this
really makes sense, shouldn't this be handled by the software instead of
cluttering the edit window with &foobar;s that most people don't even
understand?
I'm not sure I can follow your train of thought, but:
1) whether or not you use such a bot is an issue relevant to your local
Wikipedia, so there should be a vote on it there, and;
2) whether or not you use such a bot is independent of whether or not
the Italian Wikipedia uses UTF-8.
The Italian Wikipedia, just like all other smaller Wikipedias, was
converted to UTF-8 to allow you to enter more characters than just the
dreadfully limited Latin-1. With UTF-8, users can enter Cyrillic,
Arabic, Chinese/Japanese, Hebrew, etc.etc.etc. Switching from Latin-1 to
UTF-8 *only* introduces extra possibilities, and imposes no limitation,
so it's not even a trade-off.
It has been argued that those characters can't be
entered directly e.g. with
an American keyboard layout, but in my opinion this is at best a reason for
converting the entities to the corresponding characters, not the other way
round.
Firstly, you are right. Secondly, the argument isn't even valid. Just
because some people can't enter an è because they use such a limited
keyboard layout (which is their own fault), doesn't mean all instances
of è need to be changed into è ... nor does it mean anything else
of the kind, really.
(Personally, I wouldn't even mind a wiki syntax for entering special
characters, but one that is replaced with the real character upon save,
and if we do that, we might as well replace è etc. with è etc.)
(Incidentally, I've just thought of a way for people to enter the è
properly if they know that its HTML code is è. Just use the
preview and then copy & paste it back into the edit box. :) )
If this has already been discussed, could someone
please point me to the
relevant pages/threads.
I'm not aware of any past instance of this crackpot theory. ;-)
Timwi