Wikipedia:Village pump/March 2003 archive 3

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• reverse lookups -> meta:Talk:Draft privacy policy
• AP photos -> Wikipedia talk:Image use policy/copyright
• song lists -> wikipedia:list
• Acapedia -> talk:Acapedia
• Unprotect user page -> Wikipedia talk:Protected page
• Requesting feedback on an article -> Wikipedia talk:Peer review
• WikiProject notice -> Wikipedia talk:WikiProject
• Language-independent images -> Wikipedia:Language-independent images
• Article on each Chinese character -> Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chinese characters

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Couple quick questions:

• Should HTML entities for bgcolor (in tables) refer to the common name entity (i.e. "pink") or should they refer to the hex code (i.e. "#ffc0c0")?
• I have been moving quite a few images into the style seen in Moon, Rabbit, and Squirrel. Is everybody okay with that style (the image in the table)?
• Is there a good reason why Japanese is 日本語 (Nihongo) instead of just 日本語? I mean, anybody who wants to, and can read Japanese is likely to have both Japanese fonts installed, and knows what 日本語 means. As it is, it just makes that title bar longer...
• Is there any plan to get caching working in Mozilla? IE 5.5 is lightning fast, but tabs make adding entries about a thousand times more convienent.
  • I'd love to have it working, but it's a low priority for me since the caching was added mainly to reduce server load, and IE makes up by far the majority of visitors. Alas... If you can help debugging it, I'd be most grateful :) --Brion
• Is there any way to log into the ja Wikipedia with my en Wikipedia login? Certainly would be nice to use the 4~ thing in the ja Wikipedia and have it link to my user page.
  • At this time you need to set up user accounts separately on each wiki. You can use the same name, unless someone else ahs taken it which is rare. --Brion

Thanks! -- Marumari 20:58 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC)

Marumari. You ask a good question about "日本語 (Nihongo)", and indeed that represenation is redundant. I can think of two points to consider. First, a person who does not have the Unicode font installed will see something meaningless for ""日本語", so adding "(Nihongo)" at least lets them know what is behind that link. Second, an english speaker who is at the very beginning of learning Japanese might know no kanji, but only romanji. Perhaps a better solution would be to change it to "日本語 (Japanese)" -º¡º

I must admit is tempting to make the cynical comment that somebody who doesn't have a Unicode font probably doesn't care what is behind the link, but I won't.  :) I think you make a good point, although it still doesn't ease up on the amount of space that it takes up. And, of course, an English speaker who only knows romanji won't be able to make it very far in the ja wikipedia anyways. Perhaps "日本語 (ja)" would work better? But that seems a bit redundant as the user already sees "ja:..." in the alt for the link. -- Marumari 21:33 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC)

Basically, if we don't include the romanized version people complain that there's a bunch of weird question marks on the page. ;) And for the occasional person who might be able to read the language but doesn't have the font support, it's an indication that the material is there, they just need to upgrade. So I don't think it's useless... --Brion 03:47 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)

It seems to me that 日本語 (Japanese) would be the ideal way to go (unless you want to make everything at the top into "French", "Spanish", etc.) "Nihongo" is only used by English speakers who can't read Japanese text (those people will understand "Japanese"). I can see many cases where somebody wouldn't understand what 日本語 (Nihongo) means, but I can't see any cases where somebody wouldn't understand what 日本語 (Japanese) means. 日本語 (Japanese) just seems all-around clearer to me. -- Marumari 16:54 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)

This is for language links right? Well if you don't understand what Nihongo, Deutsch, or Español means then you'll have a hell of a time reading the articles behind those links. The whole purpose of inter-language links is to inform those people who can read those languages that a version of the article they are currently reading is in another language they can read. Thus we use native forms. --mav

All I'm trying to say is that a Japanese speaker is much more likely to recognize "Japanese" than they are to recognize "Nihongo". The Japanese don't really use or learn romanji in school; they learn Japanese and English. As such, (Japanese) would be a lot more recognizable than (Nihongo).