Wikipedia talk:Special characters

Moved from Village pump:

Recently I have seen some pages being created with special characters in their title (eg. Istiklâl Marsi, François Paul Jules Grévy, Émile Saisset, etc.). I'd like to know if this is accepted policy. If so, should the special character be typed in straight from the keyboard (eg. "é"), by its HTML entity name (eg. "&eacute;") or by some other means? After all, and strictly speaking, the guy's name is not Francois but Fran&ccedil;ois. D.D. 11:26 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)


 * Some people only want to allow 7 bit ASCII for page titles while a growing majority want to allow full 8 bit extended ASCII which allows for accented and other Latin-1-based characters. Some older browsers (esp. on Mac OS 9x) destroy keyboard-generated é characters. But this is becoming less and less of a problem for at least Latin-1 characters (the situation for UTF is a HUGE mess with MANY browsers breaking characters). However many English-speaking users don't know how to create these extended Latin-1 characters at all so the only way they can link directly to François Paul Jules Grévy is to copy the characters. This is bad and very unwiki. It would therefore be very nice if the software treated Francois Paul Jules Grevy as a synonym of the accented name. That way users who don't know how to create the special characters can easily still link to article titles which have them. Of course, if and when there is widely accepted Anglicization you really should use that instead. --mav


 * We could freely add redirects with unaccented titles to article with accented titles, like I just did for François P.J. Grévy, and suggest people to do so. (BTW, is putting all a person's first names in the title really useful and recommended ? I'd answer "no" to the first question, it's a bit of a nuisance for me. I'm afraid the current informal policy answers "yes" to the second question.) --FvdP 20:32 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)
 * But this only solves part of the problem (people may want to link to articles for which the redirect is not done yet). I would agree with automatic redirects, when no article exists under the unaccented title. --FvdP 20:38 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the answers. I think those redirects are a sensible solution to the problem. I'll stick with that for the time being. D.D. 09:07 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)


 * Can we have the same auto-redirects for mis-capitalisation? If there's no article under the uncapitalised title, of course.
 * How will these "auto" redirects work? It is easy enough to strip the cedilla off of Fran&ccedil;ois, but in Norwegian, sometimes the Å (a separate letter in the Norsk alphabet) is rendered as Å and sometimes as Aa.   The Aa is probably what Norwegians would expect to see in English, but maybe not.  See Talk:Åfjord for a brief, slightly informed discussion.  By the time you went through all these cases in all languages you'd have a pretty big table and likely some conflicts.  Aren't handmade redirects like Aafjord safer?  Ortolan88
 * Why not make it as simple as possible, and if there are more difficult cases, just ignore them. Surely that way we get a system better than our current one which is simple, easy ot maintain and unlikely to run into problems. Maybe when you click on an edit link for something like united states of america, in the explanation on how to edit the page it could give suggestions as what this page may be trying to link to? i.e. United States of America Smelialichu 16:19 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

Moved from Village pump:

When I write an "a" with an acute accent is it best to use the code (ie. "&amp;aacute;") or just the letter itself ("á")? Or is there no difference? -- sannse 13:40 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)


 * The letter itself, see Special characters. - Patrick 14:28 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)


 * I beg to differ. Quoting from the above mentioned Special characters page


 * Use an HTML named character entity reference like "&amp;aacute;" . This is the most reliable method, and is unambiguous even when the server does not announce the use of any special character set, and even when the character does not display properly on some browsers.


 * which seems to imply, and it would be my experiance that the HTML named character entity reference like &aacute is FAR better than inserting an #0160 directly. Rick Boatright 14:55 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

But Special characters also says "For the purpose of searching, a word with a special character can best be written using the first method." (c&p etc.) "If the second method is used a word like Odiliënberg can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg" So now I'm confused again. -- sannse 15:42 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)


 * bear in mind that many pages including that one were written when the Wikipedia software couldn't handle accents at all. I'm sure one of the devs (eg Brion :-) will be along to tell us ... - Tarquin 17:20 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)


 * That page is obsolete, pay it no mind. ;) Seriously though, let me lay it out:
 * &amp;aacute; or the uglier, but just as correct &amp;#160; will work in darn near any browser, for both viewing and editing.
 * but under our current system, it won't turn up correctly in searches
 * inserting à should work correctly in darn near any browser, for both viewing and editing.
 * A small number of oddly-configured browsers might munge it on editing. However this is fairly rare for the latin-1 wikis. (There is more trouble with UTF-8 and older browsers, see Meta.wikipedia.org technical issues, but the English Wikipedia wiki is currently latin-1)
 * Search works!
 * Note also that titles are another matter. We do allow, and some of us encourage, accented chars in titles. There is a very small portion of the browser world that chokes on these (namely, Konqueror prior to 3.1, I'm told it's now fixed). Named characters references in the text of a link should be automatically be converted to the appropriate character for linking purposes (but there are some funnies when using numeric references; currently these go to UTF-8 as their primary use in linking is the interlanguage links... someday this'll all be smoothed out. :) --Brion 17:39 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Okay, so let me see... Both work in almost any browser, but both have problems in some cases. So, erm, which should we prefer? I think I missed the actual answer there, but I'm probably just being dim... :) -- Oliver P. 17:48 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)


 * Àààààààààààààààààààààààààààààà! --Brion 17:53 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Heh! thanks, I was just trying to figure out the best way of asking again myself :) I think I've got it - I should use the characters themselves in the text to facilitate searching. (I also find it a lot easier to see what I've written that way).

As for titles: I've seen a few pages where the unaccented characters are used in a redirect page. So if someone searches for the unaccented word they don't miss a page that uses accents in the title or text. This seems useful, or is it not? sannse 17:58 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)


 * That's mainly to catch links by people who can't/won't/don't think to use the accented character. But yeah, it catches searches too. --Brion 18:53 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

IE 6.0 does not show the red diamond above.


 * 1) Test with &amp;diams; for your browser: &diams;

works for IE 6.0, does not work for Menchi's browser.

Any solution? - Patrick 08:01 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
 * The black diamond (without all the extra code) shows up fine in IE 6.0 (on XP) for me. -- Minesweeper 08:26 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
 * Okay, this is very interesting. The black diamond shows up for me in the default skin, but with the Blue Cologne skin, the diamond does not show up in IE 6.  Of course everything shows up fine in Moz 1.3. - Minesweeper 06:54 May 9, 2003 (UTC)


 * I use IE 5.5 on WinNT 4, and the &diams; symbol shows up fine for me. -- Erzengel 08:29 May 8, 2003 (UTC)


 * I stuck in an extra copy, with what I suspect were some of those MS-y "smart quotes" replaced with regular quotes. How's that? They both work for me, Galeon-1.2.10/Mozilla-1.3. -- John Owens 08:33 May 8, 2003 (UTC)


 * I removed my test (accidently with smart quotes in the text, but not in the test itself) to avoid confusion. The black diamond (without the extra code) I do not see, even though I also have IE 6.0 on XP. - Patrick 08:59 May 8, 2003 (UTC)

If people generally find the somewhat editorial part of my recent edit, about disliking the smart quotes & &amp;rsquo; apostrophes on prinicple, to be too preachy and/or POV, feel free to NPOV or delete it (I'd prefer it stay in some form, obviously). The warning about HTML tags & smart quotes should definitely be there, though. -- John Owens 07:53 19 May 2003 (UTC)

I am... a bit... speechless at this page, and at all the comments in this thread. Clearly, the current (Latin-1-centric) situation is full of problems, annoyances and nuisances:
 * 1) Limiting page titles to Latin-1 is a problem; It is very (and I mean very) annoying for a non-English speaker to see a word in their language (or the name of a city in their country) stripped of all the diacritical marks (example: Lodz); it makes a very unprofessional, anglocentric and ignorant impression. (I certainly hope nobody is thinking of replying to say Polish speakers shouldn't be reading the English version of Wikipedia.)
 * 2) Inputting non-Latin-1 characters is more than cumbersome, if not impossible for some users, even when they have the software (e.g. Chinese IME). The outlined "trick" for CJK characters does not work for me; I just keep getting question marks. So, to input CJK characters, I would have to look up the Unicode value of every single one of them and input them as numerical entities -- how much more difficult than necessary is that? Additionally, it wastes your disk space, but I suppose that's not much of a problem just now.

In comparison to that, the minor trivial problems some unpopular outdated browsers have with UTF-8 seem negligible. So... why does this site not use UTF-8? I don't know what your plans for the future are, but certainly you're not planning to stick with Latin-1 forever? You'll probably have to switch to UTF-8 some time in the future, so you might as well do it now because you have less data to convert now. -- Timwi 02:03 18 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Latin-1-centricism also cause difficulty in translating English and French articles to CJK Wikipedias. As we'd have to manually change the Unicode# back to true characters again. Or we'd have to copy the text from the webpage (not the editing page), but that'd lose all Wikification. --Menchi 02:07 18 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Cyrillic characters
Moved from Village pump

Does anybody know if there is a way to copy and paste Cyrillic characters? Whenever I try, I just get a row of question marks - is it possible at all? -- Cordyph 18:49, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)


 * It works for me with Mozilla - I did it several times with russian cosmonauts before, see e.g. Vladimir Komarov. Maybe your browser does not convert the russian characters to the Unicode numbers like &#1041; . -- andy 21:23, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)


 * Wait a moment, I just activate my Mozilla browser - yes, that works fine. I just tried this in Opera 7, but next time I will activate my Mozilla for correct character conversion - thanks a lot for the hint. (Hephaestos just told me that he has entered all the unicode values directly - appears to be a lot of unnecessary work) -- Cordyph 21:44, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)


 * Iam facing a problem with these chars(АаБ...Яя), when use in IE, it is treating as normal latin char(range from 192-255), but actual vals for these are 1040-1103 given.. pls help me as how we can treat these in IE...А —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.163.216.217 (talk) 07:38, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Un-typeable characters
Could someone give me info on how to display characters not on the standard US keyboard on Wikipedia. First of all, what is the best way to display such characters? I have seen a few ways in the past. Second, is there a listing or website somewhere which shows a table or something of all the different characters and their codes? MB 18:12, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)


 * Does the table on Special_characters help? &mdash;Frecklefoot 18:17, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * And what about Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Character Map, if you have it? (Might need switching to Unicode.) (Or, just install a lot of keyboard layouts.) &#1050;&#1089;&#1080;&#1087; Cyp 18:21, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * Charmap is fine for one or two characters otherwise a bit tedious to use. For several European languages you'll find a 'World Keyboard' at Bable Fish. Erik Zachte 23:14, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Plan to move this page to meta soon
We need one place to develop MediaWiki documentation so I'm starting a project-neutral MediaWiki User's Guide in meta and think it would be a good idea to cross wiki redirect this page to meta:MediaWiki User's Guide: Creating special characters as soon as I'm done with the conversion (before that I will change each link to this page to a direct one to meta so that it appears correctly as an external link). --mav 04:11, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Unicode
Please see the history of David Hume. An anonymous user is attempting to insert Unicode special characters into the article, and has had a modicum of support in this purpose. There's no problem when viewing the article, but when you attempt to edit it, you have to delete several characters in order to remove the codes if it becomes necessary. I'd hate to see this become a de facto standard on Wikipedia. RickK 16:42, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I hate them too. It makes it harder to edit, especially when there is a long string in a row. Don't most modern browsers support just pasting in the characters. What is the actual problem with doing that? If there is anything wrong with that, maybe the characters could be parsed so that when editing they look like normal characters, but when the page appears for display they are in Unicode. Dori | Talk 16:52, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)


 * I agree except for &amp;mdash; (&mdash;) which I think is better than using two dashes (--). Here's the transform (perl code) I've been using to fix special characters.  This (well, the guideline, not the code) should go into the manual of style if it's not there already.

# smart quotes s/[\x93\x94]+/\"/gs;    s/[\x92\xb2\xb9]+/\'/gs;     s/[\xb3]+/\`/gs;     s/[\x96]+/-/gs;     # HTML escapes     s/\&amp;#8211;/-/gs;    # &amp;ndash;     s/\&amp;#8212;/&amp;mdash;/gs;     s/\&amp;#8216;/\`/gs;   # &amp;lsquo;     s/\&amp;#8217;/\'/gs;   # &amp;rsquo;     s/\&amp;#8220;/\"/gs;   # &amp;ldquo; s/\&amp;#8221;/\"/gs;  # &amp;rdquo;     # unwanted HTML escapes     s/\&amp;ndash;/-/gs;     s/\&amp;lsquo;/\`/gs;     s/\&amp;rsquo;/\'/gs;     s/\&amp;ldquo;/\"/gs; s/\&amp;rdquo;/\"/gs;
 * Daniel Quinlan 17:40, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)


 * &amp;mdash; and &amp;ndash; do not display on some older browsers. So I use Unicode for them. This may be why you are seeing others as well. Fernkes 21:30, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)


 * &amp;mdash; should be used in articles. If it's an issue for display in HTML, then the Wikipedia software could do a transform to the Unicode character when generating HTML from the Wiki source, but I doubt that Unicode characters actually work on a higher percentage of browsers and systems.  For &amp;ndash;, it is far easier (and well-accepted) to use a simple "-" character.  Daniel Quinlan 22:29, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)


 * Dashes are annoying, everyone seems to have their own idea. People use -, --, &amp;mdash; and &amp;#8212;. The latter apparently works in more browsers than &amp;mdash;, but nonetheless people go through articles chaotically changing each of the four styles to any other of the four styles, the target style being determined by the phase of the moon and various other astrological indicators. Let's just implement render-time automatic conversion from -- to some decreed standard and save everyone the hassle. -- Tim Starling 04:06, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)


 * I thought about requesting that some time ago, but I had a bad feeling that &quot;--&quot; is sometimes used in other ways where it doesn't want to be &amp;mdash;. Using &amp;mdash; in article source may be safer. Anything to avoid numeric codes in article source, though! (If &amp;#8212; is really more reliable, we should at least convert &amp;amp;mdash; to that when producing HTML.) Daniel Quinlan 04:17, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)


 * What else is -- used for? I don't think it's used for anything where the meaning would be obscured by converting it to &mdash;. But if there is such a case, it can be escaped: &amp;#45;-. -- Tim Starling 04:26, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)


 * It is used in C sources, so any article that contains a C source would be displayed most incorrectly. Nikola 06:52, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * If I understand your regexps, you're adding the backtick, by the Manual of Style is still not a Good Thing... Dysprosia 04:08, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I only replace a Unicode/HTML backtick with a plain-old backtick. I add nothing. Much more manual editing is required to fix backticks since you need to figure out what the original editor intended or what is most appropriate in that context, so this script does additionally warn that a backtick was found.  Daniel Quinlan 04:17, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)


 * I'm no good at explaining things :) I'll let the MoS do it for me - not curved (smart) ones or the "backtick": Dysprosia 04:22, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * You're replacing left quotes with backticks, aren't you? Not backticks with backticks. -- Tim Starling 04:26, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)


 * Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the correction.  Daniel Quinlan 04:42, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)~


 * For reference I mean this character ` <-- backtick. Dysprosia 04:33, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Yeah, for some reason I thought &amp;lsquo; was the same, but it's not. I'll default to converting  &amp;lsquo to ' now.  Daniel Quinlan 04:42, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

Hi. I thought that UTF-8 was working here (for interwiki links into Maltese (mt) .. but maybe I just didn't hit the problem. Why is this site still in Latin-1?!  What seems to work for me is to force my browser (Safari) to view this site in utf-8 temporarily, and then enter my interwiki link, for example Å»urrieq and then hit submit. I have to remember to do this all the time though or it turns into w:mt:?urrieq Meta-note: I read over this whole page, if I am replying in the wrong place please let me know.  Thanks.  Srl 16:44, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)  Talk

Japanese/Chinese character sets
All of the Japanese and Chinese characters show up on my moniter as squares. Where do I go to download the software so that they display normally? --Alex S 02:06, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * It's not a matter of software, it's just a question of what fonts you have loaded. -- Jmabel 03:13, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * On some operating systems, yes. However, Windows requires a little extra component so that it can handle non-Latin scripts appropriately. - jredmond 03:18, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Old Windows versions. NT-based systems (NT 4.0, 2000, XP) should be able to handle them as long as fonts are installed.


 * In my experience most Linux/Unix distributions and Mac OS X come with the necessary East Asian fonts preinstalled. For some reason Western versions of Windows don't; they're a miniscule amount of disk space compared to modern disk drives, so saving space doesn't sound like a legitimate reason. For Windows 98/ME you should be able to find the fonts in Windows Update; for 2000/XP poke around in 'Regional and Language Options' in the Control Panel. (In XP, 'Languages' tab, select 'Install files for East Asian languages' in the 'Supplemental language support' box.) --Brion 03:25, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I think you can download these fonts, if you are using Microsoft Windows, from their website. Otherwise, there are still some free TrueType fonts around, and you can find them at http://www.unicode.org -- Tomchiukc 04:21, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * These fonts are no longer available at the Microsoft site. They can be found at sourceforge, but the legality of distribution is questionable. Arial Unicode MS which comes with MS Office ("universal font") is a good Unicode font, Code2000 is another one. Neither is free, but Code2000 is downloadable. &#8212; Jor (Talk) 13:58, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Bot work request
If at all possible, can someone who runs a registered bot set this bot to work on the Wikipedia, to remove not-necessary entities and replace them? Especially items like é are encoded as &amp;eacute;, which is completely unnecessary as é is in ISO-8859-1, and a lot easier to edit. The same applies to the other accented letters such as á, ó, è etc. Anárion 23:10, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Agree strongly; it is a real pity to have to work around &amp entities when I can just plug my Danish keyboard in and type Å Ø Æ etc :). I am still fishing a lot of these non-standard English characters out of Norse mythological related entries, 3 years on. Sjc
 * The "problem" is that Wikipedia is geared up to cope with all users, not just clever chaps like you who can swap keyboards with insouciant ease. Some people access Wikipedia, and indeed the entire Internet, from public facilities where they are not allowed to change any settings. Some people would click on en edit link like I just did and those interesting characters you so easily rattle off with a single keystroke are instantaneously replaced with garbage&mdash;some browsers are kind enough to use a question mark, some are not. The system is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator and until some dead-certain cast-iron system can be put in place to allow everybody to work the same, that's the way it should stay. In actual fact, my humble opinion is that the editing interface should intercept all characters with an equivalent HTML entity and replace them with the appropriate entity to avoid just the kind of problem to which I alluded earlier. Maybe the editing toolbar could be augmented to allow entry of HTML entities? HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 13:41, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)
 * Hear hear! Wikipedia is for readers too, not just editors. And for people with only one keyboard type available to them. Bmills 13:47, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * It should be noted that in all operating systems i've come across you can remap your keyboard so that you dont need to buy a new one for each langauge, you should check out this neat new technology. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason   02:03, 2004 Jul 20 (UTC)
 * Err, what is the point of using ISO-8859-1 if you are not even supporting characters in ISO-8859-1? Any browser which cannot display á etc. will not be able to display &amp;aacute; either, and it is a bitch to edit -- using the normal US International keyboard (not obscure language editions!). I'm not asking for full Unicode here, but for characters which over 99,9% of all PCs can display! The "some browsers" mentioned must be Netscape 4 and MSIE 4... browsers which were old years ago and which nobody uses anymore. Anárion 14:22, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I'd like to stress Anárion's point here, in case it's not absolutely clear. He (she?) is not saying "f*** people who can't see my special characters!" but rather he's saying that characters that do not need to be escaped as, for example, &amp;eacute; (because they are fully supported by the current encoding) should be simply be entered as é.  This would not affect the display on anyone's computer &mdash; it would only make the source code easier to read.


 * People who don't know how to enter such characters directly with the keyboard can continue using HTML entities, but such entities would then be automatically converted to the appropriate character.


 * Now, here is my suggestion. I don't think this should be done with bots.  Already, I've noticed that certain characters that I enter directly into the source are automatically converted to entities.  For example, if I input a Greek character such as &#916; and then hit "Show preview", I find it has been automatically converted to &amp;#916;.  This is not a bot; it's how the software works.  It determines that &#916; is not supported by the encoding and makes the necessary conversion to make sure all browsers can display it.  It would surely be easy to make conversions work the other way too; that it to say, if I enter &eacute; as &amp;eacute;, the software should detect that this character requires no escape code, and should convert it to a simple é.  Don't you think?  I think the geeks should get onto this.  What is the official procedure for suggesting software tweaks anyway?    &mdash; Chameleon My page/My talk 10:20, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Thank you for clarifying my point :) Anárion 10:25, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Sorry, you seem to have misunderstood my point. There are many examples in Wikipedia articles where a user has edited with a non-compliant browser which has broken the extended characters. If these characters had been entered using HTML entities, which are expressed in ASCII, this would not have occurred. Desperately trying to recall any specific examples, now ... Granted this is becoming less likely, and is hopefully only likely to happen with the more "outlandish" extended characters, but the idea is to impose a system which always works, not one which works fine unless someone happens to edit Wikipedia with BrokenBrowser&trade; 1.3.4 which turns each &eacute; character into a &#9774;. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 11:03, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)

áéíóú

àèìòù

äëïöü

æœ€@ñ

?????

ç? 80.58.36.239 13:09, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * That anonymous user there was me in the fabulous Netscape® Communicator 4.8, which I've just downloaded in order to see what the fuss with backward compatibility is.


 * Findings: this entire website was virtually unusable, with overlapping text everywhere &mdash; a total mess. Practically the only thing that did display fine was those accentuated characters you see above!  Those question marks are Greek letters I tried to input directly.  Greek doesn't seem to be supported at all, not even with entities.  Since Greek ("outlandish") characters which are entered using a compliant browser are converted by the Wiki software into entities, Netscape &mdash; although it cannot display them &mdash; does not screw them up in the code.  This also applies to Chinese characters, amongst others.


 * In conclusion, I think you're worrying about nothing, Phil. &mdash; Chameleon My page/My talk 13:28, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Regarding keyboard and entering special characters: on Windows, just open the Language Bar preferences and add some languages. You will then be able to use the bar to change the keymap.  I recommend the Spanish keyboard layout; it makes it easy to type most European languages.  For the slightly more adventurous, it is possible to create one's own keymap.  Just download the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator from Big Bad Bill and make your keyboard input any symbol you like.  I personally have created my own keyboard based on the UK and Spanish ones, with extra key combinations for things like "Œœ" (oe ligature), "&#12289;" (Chinese list comma), "¥" (Yen or Yuan symbol) and "—" (em dash). (Unfortunately I have to use entities instead of typing in these em dashes because the Wiki software doesn't convert them to entities, and Microsoft-produced dashes won't display properly on all computers).  I haven't worked out how to do this on SuSE Linux 9.0 yet.    &mdash; Chameleon My page/My talk 13:49, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * The ‘US International’ keyboard allows one to type almost all European chars: '+a is á for example. The MSKLC is really cool. Anárion 14:00, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I support any effort to make Wikipedia friendly to translation and multiple browswers. I can't quite follow the discussion but I noticed the reference to ISO-8859-1. I am sure you guys are already aware of it, but ISO-8859-15 ('Latin 9')is available and contains the euro character. Bobblewik 09:20, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * And with the exception of some extremely obscure characters ISO-8859-15 is identical to ISO-8859-1. Of course the right thing to do would be to move to Unicode (which is identical to ISO-8859-1 in the first 256 codepoints as far as character encoding on the web is concerned). The point of this discussion is mainly an outcry against the overescaping of entities where not needed. Anárion 09:41, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The CJK entry trick is not working for me. I have tried it several times (Mac Sys X and Safari). Any alternatives? &#37329; (Kim) 02:58, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Is there any reason this page has not been turned into a redirect?
Around a year ago, it was suggested that this page be turned into a redirect to the copy at meta. Is there any reason this has not happened yet? If I get no objections, I'll do it. JesseW 10:50, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)