Hoi,
Horribly broken is when it is not usable for an ordinary user. I was
not an ordinary user when I started editing in Farsi and, has been a
real education; it was horrible, it was broken. The only reason why I
finished the things I wanted done was because I used multiple browsers
for different tasks. Something that would take five minutes in Dutch
or English would take at least half an hour.
What is needed to have proper support for language is to have
developers who know these languages, know it as their mother language.
Who make sure that MediaWiki does not even have to suffer from "minor"
annoyances. Annoyances that would not be accepted for English.
It is rich that we feel this need to debate about what the main reason
is why we do poorly in left to right languages. All this talk is a
great excuse to do nothing. My answer is that the reason is a mix of
issues. When you change this mix by making it easier/possible to edit,
it will certainly change the potential for more contributions.
Thanks,
Gerard
On 4/13/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As I understand it, we simply need someone to keep the
LanguageAr.php
file up to date to localize the relevant keywords. When MediaWiki
provides the _functionality_ to localize something, but it is not
localized because a volunteer hasn't done it, it isn't MediaWiki that
is broken. We just need people to maintain the language files in each
language; whether it's LTR or RTL is irrelevant. This process can of
course be expedited by paying someone to do it.
As for distinguishing between minor annoyances and things which are
"horribly broken", I'd like to see some surveys among the actual users
of the various non-English Wikipedias. As things are, I am entirely
unconvinced that it is RTL issues which are the cause of the fact that
ar.wikipedia.org has "only" 12000 articles. Limited access to or use
of the WWW would be a much more important factor.
Erik
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