Grants talk:IdeaLab/Add Latinized url for non-latin alphabet languages

Clarification and Concerns

First of all, depending on your browser and on the software that receives the copied link, the IRI may be provided and copied. For example, Opera 36.0 on Windows 7 shows the IRI (for example, "https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/الله", Arabic article about God) in the address bar, I can copy it into a text-box in another tab and get the IRI, I can copy it into a Mozilla Thunderbird message and get the IRI, I can copy it into a Lotus Symphony document and get the IRI, and I can copy it into the address-bar of IE11 and get the IRI. If I "Ctrl-click" the link in Symphony, I get the expected page in the interior browser, with the UTF8-escaped URL corresponding to the IRI in the address bar.

However, when I copy the IRI into a WordPerfect 11 document, the Arabic text comes over with the characters rendered in reverse order (left-to-right rather than right-to-left). Following that link back to a browser brings up "https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/€€€€"!

Second, in some languages, there are already existing (manual?) redirects from plain-ASCII article titles to the non-Latin or properly-accented article, although it doesn't seem to be 100% coverage. So in Spanish Wikipedia, "Mexico" redirects to "México", and "Espana" to "España", and in Arabic Wikipedia, "Allah" to "لله", but there's no redirect from "Misr" to "مصر".

However, there's no guarantee that a recognizable plain-latinized form of an article title will be unambiguous. Compare es:Pena to es:Peña.

Also, what romanization system would be used? For Chinese, there would be some logic to adopting Pinyin, except that it uses diacritics (or alternately digits 1–4 after each syllable), which does not completely suppress the "abrakadabra" effect. For Arabic, there are ten systems, all of which use diacritics, the single-quote "'" and backquote "`" characters, digits 0–9, or combinations thereof. I'm less familiar with Cyrillic languages, so the "Passport" systems for Russian and Ukrainian may be compatible and do not use any characters other than Latin letters; but this tool is more complicated, and might be a lot more limited in usefulness, than it might initially seem. DavidLeeLambert (talk) 12:44, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

April 12 Proposal Deadline: Is your project ready for funding?

The deadline for Individual Engagement Grant (IEG) submissions this round is April 12th, 2016. If you’ve developed your idea into a project that would benefit from funding, consider applying!

To apply, you must (1) create a draft request using the “Expand into an Individual Engagement Grant” button on your idea page, (2) complete the proposal entirely, filling in all empty fields, and (3) change the status from "draft" to "proposed." As soon as you’re ready, you should begin to invite any communities affected by your project to provide feedback on your proposal talk page.

If you have any questions about IEG or would like support in developing your proposal, we're hosting a few proposal help sessions this month in Google Hangouts:

• April 5th, 16:00 - 17:00 UTC
• April 8th 1:00 - 2:00 UTC
• April 12th 16:00 - 17:00 UTC

I'm also happy to set up an individual session. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 00:38, 2 April 2016 (UTC)