Wikipedia:Internationalization bug reports

This is an archive only of bug reports from Phase II of the Wikipedia software (used before June 20, 2002). Please see Wikipedia:Bug reports for instructions on adding bug reports for the current system.

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Slovak(Slovakia) language is actually Slovenian(Slovenia)

Chinese (unicode?) article title created, breaks interface The Anome, Thursday, April 4, 2002

Some one has managed to create f (link removed)

with all sorts of nasty consequences (try to edit it, for example).

Removed it manually. This (the link problems) should already be fixed in CVS. Brion VIBBER, Thursday, April 4, 2002

This may be the same issue as above. Go to Poincaré conjecture, then click on "edit this link". On IE 6, I get a page "Poincaré conjecture". In order to actually edit the article, or access its history, you'll have to manually enter something like

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Poincar%E9_conjecture&action=edit

I suppose the links produced by the script should always use these % escapes for non-ascii characters. AxelBoldt, Tuesday, April 9, 2002

They have done for several days in CVS. Jimbo, can we see an upgrade soon, please? Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, April 9, 2002

The problem has largely been fixed in the latest update but still persists in "Redirected from" contexts. Try going to Poincaré conjecture (which currently redirects to Poincare conjecture) and trying to see where you were redirected from. -- Toby Bartels, Sunday, May 19, 2002

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Non-ascii in titles

• (2002/1/21) -- ISO-8859-2 characters cannot be in title of article - number of international wikipedias need this ...
  • I'll wait for the English script and the bomis CVS to go online, there are some people who know the character encoding things better than me... --Magnus Manske

Japanese Wikipedia marked as ISO 8859-1 2001-12-31

http://ja.wikipedia.com is illegible with IE 5.0 (Mac) because its HTTP (MIME) header includes the line

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

The charset should be changed to something appropriate (Shift_JIS or UTF8), or removed and replaced by the equivalent META tag.

The Japanese wikipedia now puts out "x-sjis" in its headers, Shift-JIS is allowed in page titles, and it is more or less usable. However, some characters are being mysteriously screwed up (katakana RU for instance); please test and report if you can figure out exactly what's going on. 2002-03-01 Brion VIBBER

Found it, the darn Perl CGI module was at fault with bad defaults for escaping characters. Sent fix to Jimbo. 2002-03-01 Brion VIBBER

On a similar note, visitors to http://www.wikipedia.com should be automatically redirected to the Wikipedia written in the language of their choice, as expressed in their browser language preferences. -- poslfit

Then how would Dutch/English bilinguals switch to the English version? en.wikipedia.com doesn't seem to have any content. --User:Damian Yerrick

The same problem occurs in Netscape 4.77. However, IE5 works fine. This is very similar and may be related to the problem reported at the bottom of this page. See talk:Ranma 1 for details.

wrong Slovak webside I'm sorry but your hyperlink has send me to slovenia not slovakia!

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Technical: IPA

Moved from Wikipedia:Village Pump

Why is it that on IE 5, while this web site can display every single IPA letters and diacritics correctly, none of the Wikipedias can display any, except the standard 26 English letters? Something looks wrong. We should better WP. --Menchi 07:13 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

It's the difference between <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> and <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">, I suspect.

--Paul A 08:10 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

That reminds me, are there plans afoot for following LiveJournal and using UTF-8? (LJ did so, and arranged for server-side on-the-fly translation of "legacy" entries to UTF-8 - and LJ is a good example because that's mostly user-contributed content too. Most users were unware of the change to UTF-8, but those that maintained journals in non-english charsets were overjoyed.) Tenbaset 23:21 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

We already run in UTF-8 on all phase 3 wikis except for English, Danish, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish. The reason the western European languages haven't been moved over yet is that when you edit a page on a wiki, your browser has a chance to screw up not just your contributions but the entire contents of the page. It happens fairly regularly on meta and wiktionary that someone (usually our dear Anthere :) destroys every non-ASCII character in a page by making an edit with a browser that has broken UTF-8 support, and someone else has to go in and fix them. Until we either banish all such browsers ;) or make tweaks to make safe round-trip edits in those browsers without inconveniencing the rest of us with too much armor, the western european languages will stay in Latin-1.

Note that you can use all the Unicode characters you want, including IPA, with &#12345; etc. See Wikipedia:Special characters. --Brion 00:15 May 8, 2003 (UTC)

Suggestion: keep using SAMPA in markup, but provide an option to have this "translated" into IPA characters if the user chooses. -- Tarquin 08:23 May 7, 2003 (UTC)