On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 06:29:06AM +0100, youandme(a)poczta.fm wrote:
So I can understand their willing to write Lech
Walesa
without our diactrics if that's the way they consider as already
traditional in English language.
However, let anglophones speak for themselves.
English Wikipedia, more than any other, is also used a lot by
people whose native language is not English.
For sure you can write articles in English without our
diactrics
as I can. There are more painful things in this world.
But we can fix that one, and not the others.
Writing in any language is writing in this specific
language
respecting _it's_ rules, even if the lack of diactrics is a rule.
No. Its rules must be obeyed only for words of that language.
For words from other languages, like names of people, places etc.
rules of source language must be obeyed.
Instead of rather writing in the language overriden by
some
extra syntax. Giving a correct spelling once in parentheses
is what IMO is sufficient.
Without UTF-8 you can't even do that.
Both of us are happy because we've got the
knowledge
how to make our computers and our browsers deal with UTF-8.
I haven't configured anything. It can deal with it out of the box.
Same as me - I use IE 6.0. But I tried to use 5.0 and... failed.
And IE 5.0 is not an extinct one!
Wikipedia logs show that there are people using MSIE 5.0 and editing,
so I don't know what's the problem again.
They are
losing lot of knowledge
now - after reading description of "Wroclaw" on English Wikipedia they
won't be able to find it on map
For sure they are more intelligent than you suggest!
If you strip diactrics, names of many places suddenly become the same.
So instead of one place with that name, you may have 5.
Now they will probably choose least diactricized of them,
being usually wrong.
or in search
engine.
One could say: that's the problem of the search engines, not our!
Try searching for 'Lech Walesa' on Polish Wikipedia.
Search engine is not supposed to accept broken spelling.
If it was, you couldn't search for a word that genuinely has no
diactrics, if some with the same base betters has (zadanie vs.,
ehm, "zadanie").
They are
losing
linguistic knowledge, because you can't write that without UTF-8.
Yes, they lose that but at _present_ that's not so important.
Many of them don't care about it in daily life: you see how most
of the users of English Wikipedia are happy with what they've got?
Polls "Are you happy wih English Wikipedia ?" were never done so far.
Most people I know seem to have one problem or another with it.
Why to make they happier?
Of course, once the English Wikipedia gain more non-anglophone
users it will gain more insight in those things as well.
It already has a lot of non-anglophone users.
WIkipedia is aimed to last more that 2 years. So the
problem will
be solved somehow sooner or better. But I understand
that you can't wait...
You have to switch to UTF-8 at some point. The sooner the better.