Thảo luận Wikipedia:Guestbook for non-Vietnamese speakers

Bách khoa toàn thư mở Wikipedia

[sửa] Hello all!

I really like what you all have done with the wikisite. When we started up this wiki in Vietnamese some years ago there were not that many people interesting. Now there are more than 1000 articles and still counting. Keep up the good work everyone. Joakim Löfkvist

Glad to hear from you again, Joakim! Thanks for the encouraging words; a lot of people found this site a few months back and really transformed it into the site you see here. Without them, we'd still be at around 300 articles. Just out of curiosity, do you still participate in other Wikipedias? – Nguyễn Minh (thảo luận, blog) 21:08, 10 tháng 6 2005 (UTC)

HELLO Nguyễn Minh

Yes I am still working with the Swedish Wikipedia but not as much as before. ISOC Vietnam is not as active as it was a couple of years ago but some part are still doing small stuff. UNDP are active like before though. Regards Joakim Löfkvist 19:57, 22 tháng 6 2005 (UTC)

[sửa] Vietnamese language

WHERE CAN I STUDY THIS VERY FASCINATING LANGUAGE!!!!!!!!!?????????

Some places to get you started:

Since you're at the University of Helsinki, you can enroll in its language training programme [1]. As they claim that they offer languages "from Arabic to Vietnamese", you might be able to enroll in a Vietnamese course :-). Dung Nguyen 06:59, 22 tháng 6 2005 (UTC)

Finding a Vietnamese gf/bf is really a fascinating way to study Vietnamese language :D (if you're old enough, certainly.)--Á Lý Sa 08:21, 22 tháng 6 2005 (UTC)

I don't dispute the fascinating aspect of that, but take it from one who has done it several times and be prepared for the also "fascinating" price one will eventually "pay" for such practice. Believe me, I know whereas I speak.--Mekong Bluesman 20:05, 22 tháng 6 2005 (UTC)

[sửa] Vietnamese famous writer in French

DEAR FRIEND:

IS THERE ANY INFORMATION OR RECORD IN YOUR ARCHIVE ABOUT THE FAMOUS VIETNAMESE AUTHOR WHO WRITES IN FRENCH AND IS WELL KNOWN AROUND THE WORLD WITH HIS NOVELS SUCH AS “LE FILS DE LA BALEINE”

We have one now :-). It's a stub, though. See Cung Giũ Nguyên. Nguyễn Hữu Dụng 22:13, 31 tháng 7 2005 (UTC)

[sửa] "Open" is not "Mở"

I notice that most Vietnamese people translate the word "open" (as in open-source) to "mở", this is not accurate since the word "mở" means to unlock (like with a door or a lock). In this context, "open" have a different meaning: 1) Accessible to all, and 2) Unrestricted as to participants. In this case, it should be translated to "mở rộng" instead.

A good example of this context is the "Australian Open" tennis competition, it's translated correctly to "Giải Tennis Australia Mở Rộng".

24.136.92.129 03:40, ngày 09 tháng 9 năm 2005 (UTC)

"Mở" is not only a verb that means "unlock", it is also an adjective which have both meaning you give. Regards, --Avia ^{(thảo luận)} 08:27, ngày 09 tháng 9 năm 2 005 (UTC)

I beg to differ (and agree with Avia above): "open" and "unlock" are both mở. Allow me to give some examples:

Verb
- Q: What do we have to do now? → Chúng ta phải làm gì bây giờ?
- A: Unlock that door! → Mở cái cửa đó ra!
Adjective
- Q: Which door did he went through? → Ông ta đi qua cửa nào?
- A: Through the open one, of course! → Dĩ nhiên là qua cái cửa mở!

Also, don't forget that "to unlock" normally means "to open".

Mekong Bluesman 08:56, ngày 09 tháng 9 năm 2 005 (UTC)

[sửa] Wikizine

Hi, I am w:nl:gebruiker:Walter of the dutch Wikipedia. I am writing you because your are listed as ambassador of your wiki. I have something to say that I think you will find useful and possibly others of your wiki also.

You know it is not easy for the members of a local wiki to be informed about what is going on in the higher levels of the Wikimedia family. This because of the language problem and the high level of fragmentation of places where you can find information.

I am now making a weekly news letter (Wikizine) that attempts to provide the news of the Wikimedia projects. The concept is to list only a very short description of the news an give the relevant url to the subject. I want it to be short, only give the news that is important for all projects. The target audience include the ambassadors. It is for people who are interested in what it going on outside there own wiki. I emphasize on the news that is practical-technical. The information comes form several "news"-pages on several wikis, the mailinglists and IRC. There will be news I can not discover. If you have news found somewhere or from you own wiki please let my know. wikizine AT wikipedia.be

I can only create one version in something that supposed to be English. I count on the readers to inform there local wiki about the news in there own language.

Wikizine is send by use of the mailinglist Announce-l. It is only used for this. So people can subscribe without being swamped by emails like the lists.

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/announce-l

I hope that you and others of your wiki will subscribe to Wikizine and give feedback. So that Wikizine can become really a source where Wikimedians can find out what is going on. Greetings, w:nl:gebruiker:Walter PS: do not repond here. I will not see it.

[sửa] %%%

en: Which is correct in Tiếng Việt: 40 % or 40% ?

ru: Как правильно по-вьетнамски: 40 % или 40% ?

I think 40%, but I am not sure. 193.52.24.125 13:20, ngày 16 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

Are there any rules concerning %% ? --86.102.12.10 14:04, ngày 16 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

Vietnamese people have been influenced by both French and American styles in writing percentage; however, now they seem to prefer the latter, afaik. --Á Lý Sa (thảo luận) 16:35, ngày 16 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

Two words: "Mac-culture" and "globalization"! Mekong Bluesman 16:48, ngày 16 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

It's the same issue concerning whether to put a space before a period, comma, question mark, or exclamation mark, too. At the Vietnamese wikis, however, we tend to use the American style of punctuation. – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, nhật ký) 23:52, ngày 16 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

What about printed publications?--86.102.12.10 00:23, ngày 17 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

Well, the only Vietnamese publication I have with me right now is an English↔Vietnamese dictionary published probably decades ago; it puts a space in front of every colon and semi-colon, but doesn't put a space in front of other punctuation. Although I haven't seen a percent sign in that dictionary yet, I would assume that the authors wouldn't have padded it with a space.

I'm not sure how representative that dictionary is of Vietnamese typographical convention, however. What languages pad the percent sign with a space? May we can figure it out from there.

– Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, nhật ký) 09:29, ngày 17 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

Wikies not padding the percent sign ("40%"):

ru en be bs ca cv cy da el eo es fy gd he hr id is it ja ka kk ks la lb lv li mk nl pl pt sh sr vi

Wikies padding the percent sign ("40 %"):

cs fr de fi hu lt no sk sv

see ru:Отбивка знака процента от предшествующей цифры

--86.102.12.10 11:40, ngày 17 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

Of the first list you provided, Russian, English, Japanese, Latin, Dutch, and Portuguese would be possible influences on Vietnamese orthography. Of the second list, only German, French, and Swedish might be. All the webpages from Vietnam seem to leave out the space – I think it's safe to assume that this reflects the punctuation in printed works, too. From a cursory look at Google, even webpages by overseas Vietnamese in Germany leave the space. [2]. Among Vietnamese-language webpages in France, however, the space isn't consistently used. [3] For what it's worth, it seems that French-language writers are more strict about the punctuation padding than speakers of other languages. – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, nhật ký) 21:45, ngày 18 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

Considering the time chữ quốc ngữ was first invented/used we can safely assume that the influences from English, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, German and Swedish on the written Viet language, whatever they were, must be negligible.

I seriously doubt that the Romans had the percentage sign. So we can leave Latin out too.

That leaves French and Portugese, one pads the sign with blank and one does not! (So... toss a coin and see which face it shows up.)

You also wrote that Viet webpages in France are split between the two but concluđe that French-language writers are more strict about the rule -- I hope that you did not include those Viet webpages.

I say don't pad with blank and save the space.

Mekong Bluesman 22:20, ngày 18 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

:^) English, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, German, and Swedish might not have had any influence on chữ quốc ngữ, but I'm sure they've had influence on Vietnamese-language writers overseas today; that's why I even bothered to search Google. Apparently that influence didn't make a difference when it came to the percent sign. Also, I'm not sure why in the world I included Latin! I did purposely exclude Spanish, which doesn't officially use the percent sign.

No, I wasn't talking about the Vietnamese webpages when I said that French writers tend to be more strict. But I meant that even the French punctuation-padding strictness didn't mean that all Vietnamese writers in France pad their percent signs.

Can we perhaps stop discussing this? It's becoming somewhat of a moot point.

– Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, nhật ký) 22:21, ngày 19 tháng 11 năm 2005 (UTC)

[sửa] Crocodile article

There were some bogus species in the English crocodile article. I have removed them from the Vietnamese language version of the article. Please see en:talk:crocodile. Thanks, Graham/pianoman87 07:36, ngày 01 tháng 1 năm 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your contribution, although I don't have much knowledge about this. --Á Lý Sa (thảo luận) 07:56, ngày 01 tháng 1 năm 2006 (UTC)

Quit butchering our letters! 203.122.254.26 16:40, ngày 20 tháng 3 năm 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] Infobox Country Template

I changed the {{Infobox Country}} template (not the vietnamese one, just the one named Infobox Country which currently isn't used). Now you can cut and paste infoboxes from English country articles into new blank vietnamese articles, and you have an instant Vietnamese stub article. You should then add the "subst:" keyword before the word "Infobox" and then save it. It will convert the source code to vietnamese. You can then edit it to fix up full-stops (periods) which should be commas and vice-versa, and to convert English language names into Vietnamese language names (see the front page for a complete list). You also need to convert words like President and Prime Minister into Vietnamese. CarlKenner 17:04, ngày 21 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] Celebrate us beating Walloon

To celebrate us beating Walloon in the Wikipedia language rankings (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias), I created a short tiếng Wallon article. I had better start work on an Albanian article, because that is all that stands between us and English now... Yeah, I know it's only Simple English, not the full English encyclopedia. But hey, there are litterally billions of people in the world who speak simple English, so it will be fun to beat them.

It's especially satisfying to beat Walloon, since they got there by cheating, while we got there fair and square. Half their articles are either copied straight from a dictionary, or blank robot-generated years. Whereas our articles are genuine, heavily edited, and maintained by thousands of users.

Albanian is also cheating, half their articles are blank years, going all the way back to BC. So lets beat them too.

CarlKenner 00:06, ngày 27 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

I'm still ashamed of us having more users than articles...But you're right, as far as I know only 426 articles are created by bots (366 for the days of the year and 60 for the Can Chi) :-). Nguyễn Hữu Dụng 00:14, ngày 27 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

Yes, rub it in their collective noses, why don't you. :^P

Walloon has all those dictdefs because they started out independent of Wikipedia. They decided that, because the language wasn't incredibly standardized, they needed to create dictionary entries that contributors could refer to when writing articles. That made sense back then, before there was a Wallonian Wiktionary, but they never made the effort to transwiki all those entries, so that's what you see today.

If you view all those basically empty articles as "cheating", then I guess the Vietnamese Wikipedia is a bunch of angels in a den of cons. ;^P We're one of the very few Wikipedias our size that haven't created "articles" on every year AD. I'd be a lot more ashamed of wa:1849 than I am of 1 tháng 5. When I get around to it, I'll finish up the year-article bot script, which'll already generate a lot more information than the other editions currently provide. If you'd like, you can suggest some lists that I can draw from when generating the articles (things like the winner of a notable, annually-awarded prize for particular years).

– Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 01:15, ngày 27 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I don't really mind if they cheat. It's not a competition, and it does help their users if they have dictionary definitions and year templates. I just think we deserve to give ourselves a pat on the back for having more real articles than those on the list near us.

Walloon's and other encyclopedia's auto-generated years aren't all that good. They don't even provide a universal calendar based on the 14 different kinds of years.

If we want auto-generated years, we could always just extract all the sentences from the Vietnamese Wikipedia which include years and stick them on the year pages ;-) Actually looking at the English Wikipedia's years, it has Events, Births, Deaths, and Nobel Prizes. Births and Deaths could easily be extracted from Wikipedia articles by a bot, or copied straight from the English Wikipedia by a bot (but you would only have their name and not their description, since description would need translating). Actually most of the descriptions are like "British singer" which could be auto-translated if you just programmed all the nationalities and some of the common things people are famous for (singer, artist, musician, actor, chemist, politician, etc.), and then left blank if it couldn't auto-translate. Nobel prizes are even easier. That just leaves "Events". You may be able to extract the independence dates for countries (now that we have lots of them :-) ), I'm not sure what other important dates for events are formulaic enough. CarlKenner 11:00, ngày 27 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

Those are some good suggestions. I was thinking about extracting births and deaths from the various "Sinh xxxx" and "Mất xxxx" categories, but it really would've been nice if we'd recorded people's dates and months of birth from the beginning (using {{Thời gian sống}}, which provides birth and death information). I suppose the way to go is parsing the first paragraph for sets of parentheses, and looking for dates in those parentheses that match the years of birth and death that are provided by the categories. Something we'll have to watch out for, though, is the births and deaths of Russians, since their articles often list the Old Style (Julian calendar) dates alonside the New Style (Gregorian) ones.

As for descriptions, I suppose we can use the categories again, but we need to come up with a good algorithm for finding a decent description. We could perhaps look for the category with the longest label, or perhaps the category with the most entries (but that might mean making too many lookups when creating the pages, and we don't want to overload the servers). Also, when we list Albert Einstein's birth, for example, we can also include his year of death in parentheses, like we do on the day-of-the-year articles.

Regarding events, I'm not expecting to be able to compile a comprehensive list of events in each year article, for two reasons: we link years in articles way too often for it to be useful for this purpose, and it would be a real pain to make sure that the sentences containing these year links will make sense in isolation. Your idea about compiling independence dates is a good one though, and we can naturally expand that to any infobox. So, for example, we can use:

{{Câu lạc bộ bóng đá Việt Nam}} to find out the year of establishment for Vietnamese soccer teams
Likewise for {{Infobox football club}}
{{Cầu}}, {{Cầu1}}, and {{Cây Cầu}} for the year (or even date) that a bridge was built (why do we have three templates for this?!)
{{Tóm tắt giải vô địch bóng đá thế giới}} for the year's World Cup champion
{{Bảng tóm tắt về phim}} to generate a list of films released that year
{{Tóm tắt về tiểu bang Mỹ}} for the day a state joined the Union (in addition to its order)
{{Tóm tắt về tỉnh Canada}} for the day of a Canadian province or territory's establishment (and its order)
{{Viên chức}}'s various parameters to find out when a particular person held a particular office and the office they held. If the "chức vụ" parameter contains a comma or "và" or somesuch, they hold/held multiple offices, so we should look at {{Thứ tự chức vụ}} to find out about the individual offices held. We can do the same with other boxes like {{Tổng thống}} (which even provides the dates and places of birth and death).
{{Tóm tắt về đường hàng không}} for the year/date when an airline was established
{{Hộp thông tin tên miền Internet}} for the year a ccTLD (Internet country code) was introduced
{{Thông tin album nhạc}} for the date a music album was released (also the artist, genre, record label, and date it was recorded)
{{Thông tin phim}} and {{Thông tin bài hát}} for similiar info
The "Thời sự vào tháng xx năm yyyy" templates, which will enable us to list many types of events and sometimes the dates they fall on
{{Infobox Philosopher}} for philosophers' birth and death information, as well as their schools of thought
{{Hộp thông tin HĐH}} for the latest release date and version; likewise with {{Infobox Software}}
{{Infobox Company}} for a company's year/date of establishment
{{Infobox Band}} and {{Thông tin ban nhạc}} for the years a band is/was active
{{Minor Planet}} for a minor planet's date of discovery and discoverer
{{Tranh}} for the year a famous painting was created – though we can't really use it if a range is given, as it is for the Mona Lisa
{{Thông tin bão}} for information on noteworthy hurricanes each year

Of course, we should wait until most of these infoboxes are reasonably well-used, so that we're consistently decent with our coverage. But that's the beauty of the template system: we can finally start really using metadata! Really, the hard part seems to be arranging all these items into chronological order, since many of these boxes don't really encourage contributors to find out actual dates, just the years. So we'll have to include a section of unorganized events (after "January" through "December") for now. Or, we can ditch the idea of chronological listings for now and organize instead by topic: we can have headings like "Chính trị", "Kiến trúc", and "Giải trí và thể thao".

Since many of these infoboxes feature images, we should also harvest some of those and attempt to arrange them in a reasonable way. This alone would make the pages much more worthwhile. We should also incorporate the work Nguyễn Hữu Dụng did on the Can Chi articles, so that we can provide the Vietnamese New Year's starting date under "Ngày lễ".

Despite all this information we can gather, we should still make an effort list other important events. Some events have articles here, and we should make sure that they're all assigned year categories. We might not be able to generate descriptions for these events in a decent form, but we can at least link to them, so that contributors can go in later and add in their descriptions.

By the way, we're now in sight of Meta (which has 7,093 pages at the time of writing). Forget beating English, we can beat an entire multilingual project! :^P

– Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 23:09, ngày 27 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

And by the way, I though it was hilarious that the Albanian Wikipedia's year articles only provide the highly useful information that each particular year has – drumroll please – 12 months! – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 23:42, ngày 27 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

I'm thinking it might be easiest to extract information from the English wikipedia, for people at least. It may result in less links that have articles already written (although you could filter it to only articles that exist in the Vietnamese one). Things that aren't people might have names that need translating, although you can look at the interlanguage link for the appropriate article to get the Vietnamese name if the article exists.

For births and deaths especially, I'm inclined to steal it straight off the English wikipedia's year pages. Just remove the description, or automatically translate the description if it is of a standard form.

I don't think it matters if we hit the server a lot, it just means we have to run the bot less often and create the articles more slowly. It doesn't matter if it takes a few months to create all the articles. CarlKenner 00:37, ngày 28 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

Certainly we can combine both approaches, though. I'd like us to make an effort to actually harvest information this time, since the day-of-the-year articles were a disappointment: even I lost interest and stopped expanding them. When I mention issues about hitting the server too much, I'm also talking about issues of programming efficiency: if, for every biographical article, we were to look at all its categories and determine which one had the most entries, that'd be horrible performance. I'm not good at Big O notation, but it's gotta be at least n². – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 00:51, ngày 28 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

Almost forgot: we can also use the German Wikipedia's Personendaten project for the birth/death listings. – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 06:50, ngày 28 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

It turns out that the English Wikipedia now has a Persondata project. I think it would be a good idea to start doing that here, too. – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 23:06, ngày 29 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

So we've surpassed Albanian and are, at the time of writing, dead-even with Meta. – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 09:41, ngày 29 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

Oh hey look! The Basque Wikipedia now provides the highly useful information that the year 495 BC was divided into milliseconds (milisegundo)! Kindly ignore the fact that such a unit never existed back then, but they're really starting to miss the point, having created thousands upon thousands of entirely useless stubs that get counted as "articles". – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 21:54, ngày 24 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] Vietnamese characters on Windows 2000

Hi, the Vietnamese team is doing a great job! Congratulations!

Yet, until just two days ago, I couldn't display the Vietnamese characters of vi.wikipedia, at the same time I had no problem displaying Vietanmese Unicode in en.wikipedia. I use MSIE 6.0 with W98SE/ME/2000-Pro as the majority of people still do in Vietnam!

Anyway, now it's displaying fine in paragraphs, but the accented letters (only them) in headers are still displayed in bold? that's weird?

I must add that until a few weeks ago whenever I accessed a page in vi.wikipedia, I had to run a javascript "bookmarklet" to view the page. What my script does is only forcing the use of a Unicode compatible font for the whole vi.wikipedia page (Arial Unicode MS, Times New Roman, Verdana, Tahoma and Courier New in stylesheet CSS), even though my MSIE 6.0 settings already uses Arial Unicode MS for proportional font.

Hope this inconvenience will be settled soon!

Keep up the good work!

BTW, these pages are great:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language

http://just.nicepeople.free.fr/Vietnamese-Typing.htm

82.232.216.75 12:20, ngày 29 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your kind words. Did you do anything that allowed you to see Vietnamese characters or did it do that on its own? Does Windows 2000 allow you to add support for "complex script" like in Windows XP? (On the Control Panel, choose "Regional and Language Options", then on the Languages tab check the "Install files for complex script..." options.) How Vietnamese is considered a complex script, I'll never know (probably due to the combining characters that some old sites still use). P.S. You can use the Vietnamese typing utility on the left naviagion bar of this site. Nguyễn Hữu Dụng 19:07, ngày 29 tháng 4 năm 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for answering. In fact all Windows 98 SE/ME/2000-Pro operating systems can display Unicode, i.e. all international character sets, thus including Vietnamese, provided that Unicode fonts are installed. Those fonts are: "Arial Unicode MS", "Arial", "Times New Roman", "Verdana", "Tahoma" and "Courier New". I just looked again into random vi.wikipedia pages' source code, and the problem comes from the fact that althought all the pages headings do mention the declaration line <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> which means they all use Unicode coding. But then, in the vi.wikipedia pages' CSS stylesheets, the only 2 times a FONT-FAMILY attribute was used, i.e. the lines showed below, they specify non-compatible fontsets, i.e. "serif" and "Times", in first position (priority). They shouldn't be used at all nowadays! "serif" is a legacy generic core font used in system messages, and "Times" is a Postscript Type 1 font for laser printer, and although they do exist on most machines, they can't be used to display Vietnamese. It would be best to leave only "Times New Roman" which is Unicode compatible and which exist on both PC and Mac machines. Possibly the XP operating system accepts more laxist codings than the previous versions, including NT/2000 Professional.

Q { FONT-STYLE: italic; FONT-FAMILY: Times, "Times New Roman", serif } and

SPAN.texhtml { FONT-FAMILY: serif }

Most web cafes (and also most companies' networks) in the world are still widely using the Windows 2000 Professional OS on their servers, and W98SE/ME on the client workstations. They are all 32bit/16bit compatible. As XP is a 32bit-only OS, there's an overhead cost if all existing softwares must be updated to migrate on XP... That's the main reason why this state of things will linger on for at least some more years...

I hope all my blah blah is not too long! I'm member Johannjs in en.wikipedia. Good 1st of May to you!

P.S. I read your discussion about which punctuation should be used (% % % above), please read http://french.about.com/library/writing/bl-punctuation.htm

82.232.216.75 20:03, ngày 01 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

Regarding the choice of fonts, "serif", as it's used in the stylesheets here, is not a system font. In fact, it's a standard CSS keyword intended as a last resort, in the event that the system doesn't have the specified fonts (sans-serif and monospace work similarly). [4] In any event, the stylesheets intentionally leave out any hard-coded font names – the q tag is actually never used here, due to IE's lack of support, and the texhtml class is only rarely used. The idea is that it's better to expect that the user will have the right fonts installed, because Wikipedia uses way too many languages for a single set of fonts to be correct for every language supported. You see, this stylesheet is actually part of the software, so we administrators at the Vietnamese Wikipedia have no way to change it, other than overriding it in MediaWiki:Common.css or MediaWiki:Monobook.css.

Frankly I'd be surprised if any Web café in Vietnam or the States didn't have the necessary fonts to display Vietnamese in Unicode. There's been a movement away from VNI, VISCII, VPS, and TCVN and towards Unicode, such that I haven't seen a non-Unicode page from the Vietnamese government for quite awhile. Web cafés in Vietnam simply must have adequate fonts, unless all their patrons have agreed to speak and read only in English for some reason. In the more developed countries, computers have typically come with adequate fonts since the Windows 98 days, so that's usually not a problem.

For a couple years, I had been using and contributing to the Vietnamese Wikipedia from a computer with Windows 98SE and IE6 installed. The only issue I ever had was that Windows 98 wasn't able to display Vietnamese characters correctly in the title bar, but that was only a minor nuisance, and I think there was an unofficial patch for that.

– Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 09:02, ngày 3 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

Hello Minh, This is getting very confusing, I've spent the evening testing, even appending font substitution in WIN.INI on a machine, clearing all cookies and the IE6 Temporary Internet Files cache, analyzing again, restarting the tests anew, nothing does it and the Vietnamese pages in vi.wikipedia still don't display correctly. So, here is the script I will continue to use when I come here (I've put in online so you can judge its action). In fact, now I just saw the main.css file does use another font specification

body { font: x-small sans-serif; }

So here is another test (therefore the problem might well come from the hyphen in sans-serif?)

BTW I only have main.css, commonPrint.css, IE60Fixes.css, but NO Common.css, Monobook.css in my cache.

About your paragraphs 2 & 3: you only did agree with what I wrote above, in that IE6 + W98SE/ME/2000 don't have any problem in displaying Vietnamese on all other Vietnamese websites using Unicode coding.

82.232.216.75 02:41, ngày 4 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

Nope, sans-serif is definitely correct.

But I now know what the problem is, thanks to the screenshot you provided: your computer is strangely defaulting on an rarely-used sans-serif font called News Gothic. I clipped your screenshot down to the header and ran it through WhatTheFont?! I remember having News Gothic on my old computer: a nice font it was, but it didn't support Unicode in the slightest. From my experience, you'll find News Gothic on IBM PCs and perhaps a few compatible brands. Dell and Apple don't seem to ship them.

The bookmarklet you're using seems rather inconvenient. Rather than running a bookmarklet every time you get to a page here, why not register an account with us. Once you have an account here, you can create your own monobook.css file, which will load every time you view a page here.

By the way, Arial Unicode MS is definitely overkill for Vietnamese, since plain old Arial, as well as Tahoma, Verdana, and Times New Roman have supported the Vietnamese alphabet since the version that came with Office 97 or 2000 (can't remember which).

– Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 06:56, ngày 4 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I've registered. But I didn't get round to that monobook settings (I'm so lazy), instead I checked the test machine. So here's the feedback : there was indeed a News Gothic MT font, and from its date and timestamp, it came with the Lucida Sans Unicode and OCR fonts package. I remove the lot to a new folder, and retested all again... WUNDERBAR! IT WORKS FINE! in fact when the Lucida Sans Unicode font is present, it will take control over the default settings for Sans-Serif AND Monospace when these are used. Moreover, with Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode is not needed any more to display the IPA phonetic symbols. THANK YOU.

P.S. The MS core Unicode fonts package is installed either with Office 2000 or any of its separated stand alone elements - or Publisher 2000.

Johannjs 17:32, ngày 04 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

Glad to hear it worked! – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 18:15, ngày 4 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

More feedback: the group of *.TTF fonts which I removed manu militari-ly out of the system font folder were all in the " List of Default Fonts Included in Windows 98." They were left-overs from many successive font/software installation updates. No wonder why I had to remove all of them before default font assignment (for sans-serif) could be passed on to the new core Unicode compatible fontsets. I'm lucky (but adventurous). Life has changed for so much the better since I could access all pages of vi.wikipedia without having to run my script! That was great help! Thanks again.

Could I suggest this override in MediaWiki:Common.css, so that more people could access vi.wikipedia anyhow (without modification on their PCs) and participate?

body { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman, sans-serif; }

P.S. body would have to be the first element in the stylesheet, so as not to interfere with existing specifications.

Johannjs 01:45, ngày 6 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

I think we'd have to look into the fonts list some more before introducing something like that. Other Wikipedias have overridden fonts in the stylesheet, but we have to accomodate for users that already have specialty Vietnamese Unicode fonts installed. I for one have Gentium as my default serif font and Tahoma as my default sans-serif font. But besides those, there are lots of very nice, free Vietnamese Unicode fonts available at [5]. – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 08:55, ngày 9 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

:-) In fact, you can add as many font-names as you wish in front of those, separated by a comma (if you're sure they are Unicode fonts). For example, adding Tahoma (your default sans-serif now) :

body { font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Times New Roman, sans-serif; }

as long as sans-serif is the last one in the list (only as a last resort); sans-serif musn't be alone, for we have seen it can be random and not compatible for displaying Vietnamese.

Johannjs 14:57, ngày 11 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I realize that. I'm just saying that we need to compile a decently comprehensive list of compatible Vietnamese fonts, so that we don't, err, discriminate against anyone's configuration. – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 19:17, ngày 11 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] CarlKenner

Hi. I need someone to unblock me at English Wikipedia. A vandal with Administrator priveliges blocked me for reporting his friend for vandalism, uncivility and violation of the 3-revert rule. Also someone needs to undo the vandalism of the en:Elections in Cuba article.

CarlKenner 11:47, ngày 5 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

Hi, I have been blocked too. Can't believe such things like [6] and [7] and [8] and [9] and [10] after [11] happen daily in English Wikipedia. You better off contributing here than there, because, one day or another, you will be blocked mercilessly just because of disscussing politely .193.52.24.125 12:49, ngày 5 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

By the way, which Wikipedia are you an administrator at, 193.52.24.125? You claimed to be an administrator at SlimVirgin's user talk page, but I've only ever seen you contributing here anonymously, unless I'm really bad at connecting the dots. Which I might be...

In any event, the evidence that you've provided is incriminating. People (especially admins) typically don't make a habit of removing others' comments without explanation. I haven't reviewed all that has happened at en: regarding Carl's blockage, but if SlimVirgin is indeed attempting to silence Carl, that might be grounds for filing an RfC. But IANAL.

– Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 23:00, ngày 7 tháng 5 năm 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] Tôi thường online tối đêm, một đêm 5,7 giờ ( ngẫu theo nhạc " tôi thường đi đó đây" )

Thật sự là vậy, tôi biết trang này qua TV của đài VTV1, tôi đang ở VN. Hiện tại tôi chưa có ghề nghiệp, tôi thật sự cần tìm và ghi nhớ những kiến thức ở nơi đây, mặc dù không ghi nhớ hết nhưng tôi đủ để vào đời.

Một người ở TP Cần Thơ

[sửa] yes-vietnamese speakers!

I think you are so kind that you just worry about your people! How about a lot of people they can think, they can write vietnamese but they do not worry about country? —bàn luận không kí tên vừa rồi là của 85.200.6.242 (thảo luận • đóng góp) 11:26, ngày 2 tháng 6 năm 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if I understand your question, but Vietnamese speakers outside of Vietnam can contribute too. (I'm from the United States, for example.) – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 19:00, ngày 2 tháng 6 năm 2006 (UTC)

If I correctly get what User:85.200.6.242 wrote above, only if, then I think that he wanted to express the fustration of dealing with the overwhelming view that has led everyone to concentrate on topics of Vietnam, about Vietnamese persons, related to Vietnamese geo-politico-history... at the detriment of other non-Vietnamese related topics (I wrote non-Vietnamese, I did not write non-Viet).

I haven't done the total compilation of all articles up to now in order to be able to state authoritatively that his fustration is justified. But anyone who stumbles into Wikipedia tiếng Việt in the last few months cannot help but wonders whether this is a "Wikipedia Việt Nam" instead of "Wikipedia tiếng Việt" - since a huge number of articles related to Vietnam has flooded the site. The tone of many articles (with first-person view such as "nước ta" and singing adjectives such as "vĩ đại", "đẹp nhất", "đầu tiên", "anh hùng"...) does not help the situation at all. And if User:85.200.6.242 is one of those unfortunate users who browse this site recently, then he has some "legit" in his complain.

Allow me to answer ...

First, there are many interesting articles of non-Vietnamese (and non-Viet) related topics here. Have you looked at Cổng tri thức Phật giáo? I dare to say that it is the best compiled about Buddhism in the whole Wikipedia universe. Have you looked at Cổng tri thức Kiến trúc? It may give you the answer to the question "Who built that famous building?" the next time you run accross your favourite building in your town. If you ever look into Cổng tri thức Thiên văn, please be sure to read the series of articles about all planets of the Solar System. User:David and I singlehandedly built that series up when we first join Wikipedia tiếng Việt many, many months ago. Have you tried the ever-popular Cổng tri thức Máy tính to give us a hand in translating many forever-changing terms? Have you seen the currently under construction Cổng tri thức Nền văn minh cổ? Have you read Thần thoại Hy Lạp, Bia (đồ uống), Cà phê, Immanuel Kant, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi...?

Second, the fact is that about 90% of users here are living in Vietnam, and about 9.3% are Vietnamese or Vietnamese descends living abroad. We, human, all like to write about topics dear to our hearts and what dear to our hearts is dictated by our views and our views are limited by what surround us. Like it or not (and I don't like it at all), that is what the majority of users here will do: write about topics that surround them -- and those topics will be related to Vietnam given the percentage above.

And I have no doubts that a huge number of other small-to-medium Wikipedia language versions are following the motif of "more article about the country in its language", if that language is the sole official one of that country. The big ones (English – Français - Deutsch – Español – Português – Nederlands...) don't follow that motif since thay got the contributions from people living all over the world.

So... if you allow me to give you a piece of advice: Join us, write about topics other than Vietnam-related ones, once in a while remind everyone here that this is "Wikipedia tiếng Việt" not "Wikipedia Việt Nam". Don't just complain about it.

Mekong Bluesman 22:42, ngày 2 tháng 6 năm 2006 (UTC)

I find that even the Chinese Wikipedia is having a hard time getting it across that they're not the Wikipedia of China but rather of the Chinese language (or macrolanguage, whichever way you look at it). The irony is that initially some viewed this project as a product of the United States government, or something to that effect – remember Vkpedia? Things have certainly changed since we got an influx of new users during the past several months. I'd venture to say that a perception of us being a Vietnam-ese project is progress: there were concerns initially that, Vietnam being a country in which access to computers has arrived only recently, there wouldn't be enough Vietnamese-speaking contributors to Wikipedia that we could gather a "critical mass".

In any event, I still plan to get the Rambot articles (and year entries) translated sometime this summer, and that might swing the pendulum of reputation yet again. We probably have a significant contingent of continental Europeans here, but we really need to improve coverage of Europe. There's quite a bit of information readily available at larger Wikipedias for the continent, yet so many of our articles on Europe are what I consider substubs. Of course there's more to do: art, history, law, Africa... but we need to start somewhere, right? For the English Wikipedia, that starting point was the US, and other English-speaking nations soon afterwards. For us, our starting point should be Vietnam, because the overseas communities also look back at Vietnam (quê hương) and should have a lot to write about it – topics such as the various tỉnh lỵ and minority groups still don't have decent, properly-formatted articles.

The very informal Chiến dịch chất lượng picked up some steam while Mekong Bluesman was gone, but part of an encyclopedia's quality is its breadth, and part of it its depth. It's important that this project not only develops breadth geographically, but also by adding topics from a wide variety of academic fields. Breadth is especially important for the Vietnamese Wikipedia, because there are so many topics that have never been written about in Vietnamese.

My two (rambling) cents.

– Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 04:19, ngày 3 tháng 6 năm 2006 (UTC)

Nguyễn Xuân Minh, you teased me with "...remember Vkpedia?". Yes, whatever happened to them, you know? And, besides, you should ramble more often. Did you change the name of that portal on the Main page from "Nền văn minh cổ" to "Hy Lạp & La Mã cổ" as I suggested? Mekong Bluesman 05:47, ngày 3 tháng 6 năm 2006 (UTC)

Vkpedia is still hovering at about the same size they were when we were criticized for growing "too slowly", though it's entirely possible that some former Vkpedians have joined the Wikipedia ranks – and that's great, because we can build a bigger, better resource together. The Vietnamese Wikipedia is still far too small for any content fork to be viable. Wikinfo and the Enciclopedia Libre Universal only forked when the respective Wikipedia editions had grown to tens of thousands of articles, whereas we only had about 300 articles when they went their way. To their credit, they got a nice press mention early on – and would you know it, they were billed as the "Vietnam Wikipedia", just as Baidu Baike (Bách Độ Bách Khoa) is almost exclusively called "China's Wikipedia" these days... – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 07:09, ngày 3 tháng 6 năm 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] TuvicBot

Di chuyển đến Thảo luận Wikipedia:Robot/Xin phép

[sửa] Belarusian translation

I can translate this text: --- ENGLISH-SPEAKING WIKIPEDIANS: If you have questions or comments on the Vietnamese version of Wikipedia, please leave your message here. Thanks for visiting our site!

Click here to leave your message right now! Review other visitors' messages! Find out more about us. --- into belarusian language. Do I have a right to put belarusian translation to the main page of guestbook? Thanks for attention! 82.209.208.162 12:59, ngày 14 tháng 7 năm 2006 (UTC)

You are welcomed to do so. If you are not sure, you can leave the translation here and someone will add it to the page. - Trần Thế Trung | ^{(thảo luận)} 13:52, ngày 14 tháng 7 năm 2006 (UTC)

You may also want to translate Wikipedia:Giới thiệu/Tiếng Anh into Belarusian version at Wikipedia:Giới thiệu/Tiếng Belarus.- Trần Thế Trung | ^{(thảo luận)} 14:03, ngày 14 tháng 7 năm 2006 (UTC)

I've done. Thanks for support! 82.209.208.35 15:31, ngày 14 tháng 7 năm 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] Wikipædia Rocks!

Wikipædia Is Amazing, I Hope It Never Goes Offline! —bàn luận không kí tên vừa rồi là của 72.138.209.105 (thảo luận • đóng góp) 23:18, ngày 20 tháng 7 năm 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] Greetings

Hi! I would like to help to improve the vietnamese wikipedia with some images from commons. And... learn some vietnamese. Then, i will try helping with texts. Thanks.--Eduardoferreira 23:09, ngày 30 tháng 7 năm 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] Help with information on a picture

Hello. I am a new member of Việtnamese Wikipedia, but my Việtnamese is not very good. I have a question about a picture of Chủ Tịch Hồ Chí Minh. Please tell me everything you know about the fourth picture in the slideshow at [12] (sould be captioned 'The man who made independent [Việtnam]). What is the copyright status? Is it in the public domain? When was it taken? Where was it taken? Anything you know about it, please let me know. Thank you very much. --Ionius Mundus 19:47, 27 tháng 8 2006 (UTC)

It's a well known picture. One foreign journalist had taken the photograph while Ho Chi Minh was saying goodbye to a group of foreign guests (including the photographer) after a meeting, in a quite natural way (not arranged photo, Ho Chi Minh was looking at those guests not for a photo, but for saying goodbye). It was possibly at the ground of en:Presidential Palace, Hanoi, where Ho Chi Minh usually received foreign guests. This picture later was a gift of the photographer to the government of Vietnam, so I guess public domain applies here. But you have to read those Vietnamese newspapers where I think I got these information from, before taking my words into account. - Trần Thế Trung | ^{(thảo luận)} 17:04, 6 tháng 9 2006 (UTC)

Cám ơn! This is very helpful. Could you give me some links to the newspaper articles you mentioned? Again thank you. --Ionius Mundus 16:46, 9 tháng 9 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] Translation into Vietnamese

Hi, can someone translate this article into the Vietnamese Wikipedia for me en:Wikipedia:Translation into English to (something like) Wikipedia:Translation into Vietnamese ? Thanks, reg. en:User:Mion

Sorry, I meant to say that this page and Wikipedia:Bài thỉnh cầu serve the same purpose as en:Wikipedia:Translation into English, though I guess a guide on how to translate into Vietnamese could be helpful. Wikipedia:Bài thỉnh cầu already lists translation requests: just create a new heading at the top of the "Những bài thỉnh cầu" section and link to the English/German/French/etc. version of the article that you want translated. It's easier to manage all the requests on one page. – Nguyễn Xuân Minh (thảo luận, đóng góp) 17:57, 6 tháng 9 2006 (UTC)

[sửa] Bot status for JAnDbot