2010/7/3 Lars Aronsson <[email protected]>: > Let me start from another angle: Does anybody have > experience from teaching beginners how to contribute > to Wikisource? What are the hardest concepts to explain? > I think we should compile and rank the current obstacles > to the growth of Wikisource.
There's a serious and overlooked problem that makes both contributing and reading hard for many people: a considerable number of texts use special characters which aren't supported in regular fonts. This is not a matter of pure aesthetics like Arial-vs.-Helvetica, but complete omission of characters or even scripts. For example, there are several grammar books in the English Wikisource (see http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Grammar ). Among them are Hebrew, Burmese and Sanskrit. Without manually installing proper fonts it's impossible to view any of them properly on Windows XP; the situation with GNU/Linux and Windows 7 is somewhat better, but still not perfect. Bug 2361 ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2361 ) could possibly solve it, at least partly, but there hasn't been any activity in it for a long time/ -- אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי Amir Elisha Aharoni http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
