Hoi,
What I am saying is that this is something that is our power to solve. It is
not the only issue but this is something that is easy to solve,
Thanks,
Gerard
2009/7/17 Mark Williamson <[email protected]>
> Are you saying that if we had better font support for African
> languages, they would not languish anymore? I do think it is a
> necessary step but it is only the start. The reasons most of our
> African language projects remain in such a state are manifold, in my
> view.
>
> Also - and perhaps this remains unknown to many - it seems to me that
> most Indigenous American languages on Wikipedia that have noticed any
> significant growth are built all by hobbyists with poor to mediocre
> command of the language, filling those Wikis with thousands of pages,
> and in the past they were even writing a good deal of the content in
> Spanish.
>
> The fact that we allow almost anybody who volunteers to take near
> total control of a project in the absence of a community is not among
> our strongest attributes. For example, Jose77 - who does not even
> speak Uyghur by his own admission - overtook the Uyghur Wikipedia for
> awhile and based on personal vendetta converted most everything to
> Latin script, when Arabic is by far the most used script for the
> language. It remains heavily filled with Latin script content.
>
> The Nahuatl Wikipedia is still dominated by non-indigenous hobbyists,
> who fill the posts of administrators and most prolific editors.
>
> My view on such things has always been a minimalist approach - seeing
> an empty Wiki can be discouraging, so it's nice to put a little
> content there if you have some basic ability in a language so that
> others may feel more welcome. For example, at the Navajo Wikipedia I
> created around 100 bare-bones pages based on my rudimentary knowledge
> of the language, hoping that someone else would come around later and
> add more; in comparison, many of these people seem to be preoccupied
> with article counts, looking to create thousands of stubs in what very
> well could be completely nonsensical to a native speaker.
>
> In some cases, my approach seemed to work very well. In a handful of
> others, it appears to have been less successful - the native speaking
> editor who has come to one Wikipedia has been following my "example"
> of making pages that have a single sentence and an illustration,
> rather than expanding upon existing pages or creating longer new pages
> and did not respond to the message I left him.
>
> Mark
>
> On 7/17/09, Gerard Meijssen <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > Downloadable fonts have a much bigger application. Many of the African
> > Wikipedias languish because of a lack of support for extended Latin
> > characters. The people from ANLOC are happy to help us assess where
> > MediaWiki does not support these languages. This does affect whole wikis
> and
> > it is one technical reason that can be solved why many of our African
> > projects languish.
> > Thanks,
> > GerardM
> >
> > http://www.africanlocalisation.net/
> >
> > 2009/7/16 Amir E. Aharoni <[email protected]>
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I am proofreading Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar [1] on the English
> Wikisource.
> >>
> >> It uses intricate formatting and for proper display of Biblical Hebrew
> it
> >> needs a font which isn't installed on most people's computers.
> >> Fortunately,
> >> this font, called Ezra SIL SR, is Free Software, released under the Open
> >> Font License.[2]
> >>
> >> Some modern browsers, such as Firefox 3.5 are able to render
> downloadable
> >> fonts in a way that is consistent with draft CSS 3 standard. Would it be
> >> possible to upload such a free font to Wikimedia servers and let people
> >> who
> >> use modern browsers, but don't have the font on their computer, enjoy
> the
> >> book with proper fonts without bothering with installing new fonts?
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance.
> >>
> >> [1] (
> >>
> >>
> http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Gesenius%27_Hebrew_Grammar_%281910_Kautzsch-Cowley_edition%29.djvu
> >> )
> >> [2] (
> >>
> http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=silhebrunic2 )
> >>
> >> --
> >> Amir Elisha Aharoni
> >>
> >> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> >>
> >> "We're living in pieces,
> >> I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Wikitech-l mailing list
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> >>
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> >
>
>
> --
> skype: node.ue
>
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