[Foundation-l] Languages and numbers

Sat Jul 2 18:16:33 UTC 2011

2011/7/1 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
> As Russia is fairly developed country, it is likely that reaching people
> who speak those languages and teaching them how to use Wikimedia
> projects would the task for WM RU. Besides that, I think that all
> languages of Russia have writing systems and support in Unicode.

Actually, a few small languages in Northern and Eastern Russia don't
have writing systems, but at least for some of them one is being
developed by the government.

And all the current languages of Russia are indeed supported in
Unicode, but in a few discussions i had just a couple of weeks ago i
learned the shocking truth: While we take Unicode for granted for
about a decade, it is not so for quite a lot of people around the
globe. In less developed parts of Russia there are still computers
with Windows 98 and even earlier, and Unicode support there is poor to
non-existent. Maybe in Russia WM-RU can indeed handle this - for
example, to organize sending donated second-hand computers to key
organizations in these regions (schools, libraries, local newspapers
etc.)

This, however, happens in many other countries, some of which need
Unicode even more desperately than these Russian regions, and which
don't have a chapter. For example, Ethiopia. There the Foundation or
other chapters will be able to help. WM-IL, for example, sent
second-hand computers pre-installed with Ubuntu and offline Wikipedia
to African countries, and maybe other chapters did similar things,
too.

Long story short: Unicode support cannot be taken for granted, but
something can be done about it.