Sunday, February 01, 2009

My appeal to Jimmy Wales

Jimmy, in a thread about counting characters, you express that you should be informed about such stuff. A reference is made to a manual of style discussion about scientific notation. Obviously it is very important and I am glad that you may make a difference in getting this important issue moving.

Jimmy, many of our Wikipedias are not doing so well. The problem for several of them is really basic. The characters used do not show up properly and reliably in modern browsers. The problem is a mix of MediaWiki, browsers and fonts. The issue is that no one is interested in championing a complete solution.. Too many parties seem to be involved.

Jimmy, you have your connections in so many places. You are an "approved character". Your appeal is obvious. You can make a difference because really the issues can be solved. This issue needs a champion.

Jimmy, could you please help me make my dream come true that a word like "Mbɔ́tɛ" will show up properly everywhere in MediaWiki. Could you please help realise this dream that all languages can use MediaWiki as it is intended. Oh and Jimmy, when the Lingala Wikipedia for instance takes off, they will need scientific notation too.
Thanks.
GerardM

2 comments:

Bawolff said...

Well I'm all for good language support and all that, How is jimbo supposed to fix that? Except for saying something like "It'd be really nice if this worked....", what else can he actually do?

p.s. for the Mbɔ́tɛ issue, I think part of the problem is an error in the Lingala wikipedia [[mediawiki:common.css]]. There should not be a # sign before the word textarea. (the other number signs are correct though).

GerardM said...

Jimmy has an impressive range of people who will listen to him. I have a plan of action that has met the approval of several specialists in this field.

As to Lingala, the issue is exactly NOT a problem in the Lingala project because they changed a few thing that made it *magically* disappear. Brion calls this a "voodoo solution".
Thanks,
GerardM