2011/7/1 Milos Rancic <[email protected]>: > 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. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
