ГӀахьалчиясул бахӀс:N-true

The "palochka" issue

Why are you vandalizing the whole wikipedia with your decision on palochka?! In most browsers in Russia the "real" palochka looks like a stupid bar (meaning that computer couldn't find the character). Moreover, there is no way to type it from any keyboard. Vandalizing Avar wikipedia in your way means cutting off access for reading and editing to lots of potential users! Could you be so kind as to reverse your work? - Amikeco 17:37, 16 мая 2006 (UTC)

This is not "vandalizing", as you call it. I'd call it "regularization" to Unicode. Chinese people wouldn't switch to writing Pinyin in ASCII just because there's one browser that cannot display Hanzi correctly. The palochka works perfectly well in Opera (as far as I know) and Mozilla Firefox. Only on the Internet Explorer it seems to show up as boxes, but IE has several mistakes anyways. The easiest way to get the palochka is to copy it from somewhere (CharMap or an existing entry or somewhere), copy it to the clipboard and insert it by Ctrl+V whenever needed. That's how I did it as well.

However... you seem to be right that at least in the IE it's not working properly. Thinking about it, a different solution might be better indeed. People replace it by "1", "I" (capital i) and "l" (small L), I've run a test on Google with the word "маг_арул" and inserted all 3 possible letters:

• магӀарул (with the palochka) yields 188 pages,
• маг1арул (with the number one) yields 29 pages,
• магIарул (with the capital i) yields 708 pages,
• магlарул (with the small L) yields 2 pages.

This shows that in fact the capital-i-version (instead of the small-L-version) is clearly the most wide-spread. If we are to replace the correct palochka by a substitute, then by the I, in my opinion. Have there been any discussions about this, anywhere?

Until then I would — if you have no objections — rather stay with the real-palochka-version until this issue is settled and a solution has been found. I apologize also for deleting your hint from the Main Page, maybe one should just rephrase it to ask people about their opinion on the palochka.

Another thing: I have "cyrillified" 1 out of 4 entries (namely Батасуна) that Участник:Avarian wrote in a unusual Latin orthography. Do you speak Avarian? I've done my best to get it transformed right, but I don't speak the language so I'm only 95% sure. — N-true 18:09, 16 мая 2006 (UTC)

I'd try to reply in a structured manner, if you are not against. :) - Amikeco 19:43, 16 мая 2006 (UTC)

Comparing with Chinese and mentioning browser wars

You write "Chinese people wouldn't switch to writing Pinyin in ASCII", but Chinese use hieroglyphs regularly, each day, while Daghestani people use Russian at their computers most often. Those computers (at schools, universities, homes) are good in showing Latin and Russian letters, but not the other parts of Unicode table.

The same goes to browsers: the statistics page at my site dedicated to Ossetic shows that 75% users in Russia (similar public, as might be here) just use IE6. That means that we can't really expect that they will start using another browser just for Wikipedia: somebody will, but most people would just say "ah, well, I can't see the letter, the text is a mess". Amikeco 19:43, 16 мая 2006 (UTC)

Latin script

You are absolutely right reverting the Latin script articles to Cyrillic. The Latin alphabet used in them seems to be smart, but it's just an "original research", there's no place to it in Wikipedia. Amikeco 19:43, 16 мая 2006 (UTC)

How the today-decision on palochka appeared

You write: "in fact the capital-i-version (instead of the small-L-version) is clearly the most wide-spread". Well, it's true. And maybe they will change to it (see below about status).

I've decided to use smaller L because of a similar decision, made about the future Lak wikipedia (lbe:) by users of the forum http://lakia.fastbb.ru — I've just copied the text (replacing "Lak" to "Avar") from the test wikipedia at meta. Before that copying I've talked about the issue with MONARCH79. Amikeco 19:43, 16 мая 2006 (UTC)

Status of the palochka decision

You propose: «maybe one should just rephrase it to ask people about their opinion on the palochka». It's a very good point: the Avar wikipedia is starting to grow now (with a new active Avar-speaking user MONARCH79 and probably others yet to come), in no time there will appear a kind of forum, where they should start discussion on solving the palochka issue. Amikeco 19:43, 16 мая 2006 (UTC)