Wikipedia:Village pump/May 2003 archive 6
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I've discovered quite an annoying problem recently, concerning edits that include special characters and I'm wondering whether this is known more generally? The examples I've encountered has transcribed characters such as "Å" into "AA" and "ü" into "u:". This is thoroughly annoying, and what's worse it has also broken established links to other articles. At first I suspected merely carelessness by the individual editors, but now I'm more inclined to believe that it's some form of configuration problem on their systems. Examples include:
All these changes broke established links, but the changes has been reverted. Does anyone have more information on this, and has there been any action taken to stifle the effects of this malice? -- Mic 08:12 19 May 2003 (UTC)
- Grepping some logs.... Aha! Links (0.97pre3; Linux 2.4.18-6mdk i586) IIRC Links has some problems with editing text with non-ASCII chars, particularly if running in console mode. At least it's trying to convert the characters to an ASCII representation instead of random binary garbage, but it's still a problem. --Brion 08:31 19 May 2003 (UTC)
- Coincidentally, this is usually closely related to something I just added a note about on Wikipedia:Special characters. It seems to happen mostly when people copy the text of the page into a word processor kind of application, do something there they can't do in the browser itself, like a search & replace or whatever, then copy & paste that back into the edit window. Often, it seems, even though the browser itself might be able to deal with the special characters, either the WP program or the clipboard itself doesn't, and you end up with "u:" instead of "ü", etc. My own particular rant on the page was about how this can mangle HTML markup, because some programs will automatically "help" by replacing all the quotes with "smart quotes", including in HTML tags, which is where the real damage is done. However, despite its strong connection with certain products related to Bill Gates, I don't think any actual malice is usually intended. ;) -- John Owens 08:34 19 May 2003 (UTC)
- In light of Brion's comment added during edit conflict, I'll footnote the above by saying OK, that probably wasn't the case in these particular instances, though. -- John Owens 08:34 19 May 2003 (UTC)
On my work, where I suspect the Windows NT-version run is rather old, due to a policy of not doing unneccessary updates, I have noticed a similar phenomenon. If I, in a www-interface for e-mail similar to the wiki-interface with text-boxes, open a received letter, intending to forward it, then non-danish characters are conversed to their "&something;" equivalents on save. I.e. I don't notice it unless I make a temporary save. It's even more irritating when less usual characters (as English quotation marks or em-dashes) are converted to "&digits;". I suspect I've seen traces of the same behavior here. Is it, beside the more serious problem User:Mic addresses, also a problem if <<Åland>> is converted to <<Åland>>?
-- Ruhrjung 09:01 19 May 2003 (UTC)
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- I'll step up to the plate here and admit that the guilty party in the cases mentioned by 'mic' is me: 'cimon avaro'. No malice was intended however. The problem seems to have stemmed from not always remembering to set the character-set to ISO 8859-1 (the default is 7 bit ASCII). I twiddled it so that it is set automatically on launch of the program. So far so good, knock on wood. Do let me know if the problem persists with edits I make. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 06:21 21 May 2003 (UTC)
Anyone feel like writing Chelsea Flower Show, since it's in the news? -- Tarquin 19:22 20 May 2003 (UTC)
- It's not normally my cup of tea, but I have a spare half hour. I'll take it up. Where do I go when I have something decent to submit it for the front page as a "in the news" item? CGS 19:28 20 May 2003 (UTC).
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- Here: Current events. --Menchi 22:21 20 May 2003 (UTC)
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- I've written more than a stub (dates, short history, external links... well, have a look), but is this enough for a current events article? CGS 22:23 20 May 2003 (UTC).
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- The article's got everything I can think of: history, nowadays, awards... But the intro seems so short. But since I never attended a flower show, I'm not sure what should be added. You're now a quasi-expert on this show, maybe you can think of something? --Menchi 23:16 20 May 2003 (UTC)
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