Hi Amir, thanks for the bug report! We will go and implement it along the lines you suggest it.
I have one question still, maybe you can help me: About 10% of the titles in the Hebrew Wikipedia are in latin alphabet (very rough estimate, may be completely off, based of a glance on Special:Allpages). So an article like http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday, where the title would be LTR, would be declared as RTL. Is there a way to avoid that? I guess the answer is no, but I wanted to ask. Cheers, Denny 2012/8/11 Amir E. Aharoni <[email protected]>: > Hallo, > > It's my first email on this list, so in case you don't know me: I am > Amir, I'm from Israel, I'm a wikipedian since 2004, I write mostly in > Hebrew and English, I care strongly about language issues in software > in general and about right-to-left support in particular, and I work > in the WMF's localization team. > > Now, about the subject: you probably know that i18n is > "internationalization" and "l10n" is "localization". "m17n" is a less > common term, which means "multilingualization" - making software able > to work in many languages at once. This email is about one of the > easiest and the most important ways to make Wikidata support many > languages on one page everywhere. > > I've been testing the Wikidata demo for a few days now, with the aim > of getting it deployed in the Hebrew Wikipedia very soon. The first > thing that I noticed is that even though everybody understands that > Wikidata is supposed to be massively multilingual, little or no use is > made of the lang and dir attributes in the HTML that Wikidata > generates. The most immediate example is > http://wikidata-test-repo.wikimedia.de/wiki/Data:Q2?uselang=en > > It basically lists the word "Helium" in many languages, but as far as > the browser is concerned, almost all of it is written in English, > because the root <html> element says lang="en". The only exceptions > are the interlanguage links in the sidebar, where the lang attributes > are user properly, but that's a regular MediaWiki feature. > > It is very much needed to explicitly specify the lang attribute and > also the dir attribute (direction: "ltr" or "rtl") on every element, > the content language of which is known to be different from the > content language of the enclosing element. Many developers may think > that this attribute doesn't do anything, but actually it does a lot: > * correct text-to-speech and speech-to-text handling > * correct font rendering (relevant for Serbian [1], for some languages > of India etc.) > * selecting the correct spell checking dictionary > * selecting the right language for machine translation > * adjusting the line-height > * selecting the web font (in MediaWiki's WebFonts extension) > * etc. > > So please, use it whenever you can. > > Always use the dir attribute in these circumstances, too. It must be > specified explicitly even though "ltr" is the default, because if the > user interface is right-to-left, it will propagate to elements in > other languages, too, so you would right-to-left English. (I consider > this a bug in the HTML standard... but it's a topic for a different > email). > > In the case of the page that I mentioned above, it should be quite > trivial to fix, because MediaWiki's Language class provides very easy > functions for this. I also opened bug 39257 [2] about it. I am > repeating it here on the mailing list, just to say to the developers > to do it everywhere. If you are a developer and you run into any > problems with using these attributes, please contact in any way that > is convenient to you. > > Thank you! > > [1] See https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80 > [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39257 > > -- > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי > http://aharoni.wordpress.com > “We're living in pieces, > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore > > _______________________________________________ > Wikidata-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l -- Project director Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
