The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is pleased to announce the
first release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle. The bundle
is a collection of selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki
which desires to be multilingual.
This first bundle release (2012.11) is compatible with MediaWiki 1.19,
1.20 and 1.21alpha.
Get it from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MLEB
The Universal Language Selector is a must have, because it provides an
essential functionality for any user regardless on the number of
languages he/she speaks: language selection, font support for
displaying scripts badly supported by operating systems and input
methods for typing languages that don't use Latin (a-z) alphabet.
Maintaining multilingual content in a wiki is a mess without the
Translate extension, which is used by Wikimedia, KDE and
translatewiki.net, where hundreds of pieces of documentation and
interface translations are updated every day; with Localisation Update
your users will always have the latest translations freshly out of the
oven. The Clean Changes extension keeps your recent changes page
uncluttered from translation activity and other distractions.
Don't miss the chance to practice your rusty language skills and use
the Babel extension to mark the languages you speak and to find other
speakers of the same language in your wiki. And finally the cldr
extension is a database of language and country translations.
We are aiming to make new releases every month, so that you can easily
stay on the cutting edge with the constantly improving language
support. The bundle comes with clear installation and upgrade
installations. The bundle is tested against MediaWiki release
versions, so you can avoid most of the temporary breaks that would
happen if you were using the latest development versions instead.
Because this is our first release, there can be some rough edges.
Please provide us a lot of feedback so that we can improve for the
next release.
-Niklas
--
Niklas Laxström
I writing to you by recoomendation of Andre Klapper
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:AKlapper_(WMF)> about the issue, and
he said that I should ask The Language Engineering team about the issue I
wrote about.
I am writing as a bureaucrat of mk.wiki on the suggestion of other active
editors and admins who feel that there is one issue that needs addressing
on our wiki.
Namely, that is the italics, whenever we use them. Unicode automatically
shows the East Slavic italics, where several letters are different than in
our own (and Serbian) alphabet. See the heading Differences from other
Cyrillic alphabets
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Cyrillic_alphabet#Differences_from_ot…>
in
the Serbian alphabet article (the image to the right shows the
differences.. The correct ones for Macedonian and Serbian are i in the
rightmost, yellow column). Same applies to Macedonian, i.e. it is the same
letters that are different. In the text further near the end of the
section, it mentions OpenType and things I don't udnerstand.
Our question, as a wiki-community is: is it possible to have something done
on our wiki (something to be installed) or elsewhere, so that we will get
the proper letters? I know that some free fonts support this, but I am not
sure which. I am sure the Serbians will also be interested to implement
this on their wiki (although their case is somewhat more complicated by the
fact they use dual script on all pages).
We, as a community, use different operating systems and browsers, but
everyone sees the Russian-Bulgarian italics, not the Macedonian/Serbian
ones.
Below I have a screenshot of a test I just made for each of the letters.
Here is again the table of differences
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serbian_Cyrillic_Italic.svg>. The
ones we want are in the rightmost (yellow) column. We are asking if it is
possible for all italics to be displayed this way on the wiki. This will
need some special intervention (I assume) as currently we don't have them,
but the Russo-Bulgarian in stead. (See screenshot below)
This applies to every OS and browser, because it is a standard by Unicode
that hasn't been modified yet to introduce our letters, and so it is, by
definition, impossible for us to get Maced./Serb. italics without tweaks in
the wiki. Our question is: are those tweaks possible, so our italics will
look like that in the yellow column.
I hope there may be a solution for our community.
Thank you very much,
Bojan Jankuoski,
User: User Bjankuloski06 / Б. Јанкулоски
<https://mk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0…>
--
Бојан Јанкулоски I Bojan Jankuloski
Главен програмски раководител I Chief Program Manager
Споделено знаење I Shared Knowlege
тел. | tel. +38978 282 698
