User talk:Bgo eiu

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Arabic letter mark

Hi,

Why is Arabic letter mark necessary in MediaWiki:Pipe-separator/pnb? Does it ever appear in context where the display is wrong without it? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:49, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

@Amire80 Generally any punctuation character and numeric digit presents an issue for text direction if the Arabic letter mark is not included. It is needed in a lot more places I haven't identified yet, as seeing things like

"نمبر 1"

where it should say

"؜1 نمبر"

(I had to use the Arabic Letter Mark to do that second one just now.) Bgo eiu (talk) 17:53, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

OK, but that's not exactly what I asked. Do you have an actual example of where anything wrong happens with this message? Because if it's really needed here, then it may also be needed in other RTL languages, and then it should be fixed more globally. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 22:41, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Please note that your samples with "نمبر 1" is done in a context where the containing paragraph still has a left-to-right direction by default (inherited from the default language of this wiki.

In actual pages in Arabic the context is different (it is set in MediaWiki pages for Arabic where the page content uses the "mw-content-rtl" class). The pipe separator however is neutral and should preserve the defautl direction of paragraphs of lists are used (this is also true in English pages that are showing multilingual lists). Normally for multilingual lists you never need to change the separator, but instead you "isolate" each item (e.g. by using the standard "bdi" HTML tag). Using Unicode BiDi controls is strongly discouraged in any web page, in favor of styling or using HTML tags to mark the isolates. Look at how your two examples are rendered in actual Arabic context:

"نمبر 1"

"where it should say "

"؜1 نمبر"

You can immediately see that your examples are not using Bidi controls, but you have swapped the number and the month name in the string (in the 1st example the day number comes first before the month name; in the 2nd example the month name comes first before the day number: the only good order is the logical one that matches how Arabic pronounce them)

But the real question is how you can use "pipe separators" to render lists (notably multilingual names, such as lists of user names, or lists of language autonyms), independantly of the items that are inserted in the list; but that order of items should still never be changed in the middle of the list that must remain undirectional, right-to-left only in Arabic (only individual items may internally change the order and in all cases an item must never be splitted in parts that would be placed in separate position of the list); you don't need any BiDi Letter Mark control for that, you need isolates. (You should read the Unicode BiDi specification, which is also used in HTML and notably on all MediaWiki-based wikis). The W3C also agrees: Bidi controls are only tolareted for use in pure plain-text and only when it is not assembled piecewise, and the implict default direction fo the complete plain-text document is properly set to correctly place the side of the starting margin. For rich-text documents, including HTML and wikis, markup elements for isolates and proper styling for the container should be used, and never overrides or letter marks, except in versy specific places to locally change the default behavior of specific character to be different from what is provided by the BiDi algorithm (e.g. to change a character with "weak" direction, like common digits or punctuations, into a character with strong directions (like letters), or reverse the normal direction of letters (e.g. treat the letter A as if it was an Arabic letter, for borrowing purposes). Verdy p (talk) 01:47, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

@Verdy p There is no month name in my example, nor are the examples of Arabic. I agree proper styling should be used but that ship has sailed for whoever does the styling on Wikimedia sites. Bgo eiu (talk) 12:13, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Sorry if I read that as a date, it does not matter however if it is a quantity number and a noun. For that usage the bidi control should still not be used with numbers (numbers are "weakly neutral", even if digits are individually written and rendered left-to-right, and the BiDi algorithm handles them correctly in the Arabic script). Verdy p (talk) 12:23, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

@Amire80 I can't remember exactly where this is use. But on Wikidata for example, the text direction for pnb specifically is often set incorrectly so I don't think it is necessarily always the case that other RTL languages would need this. Bgo eiu (talk) 12:10, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikidata can be fixed to set the correct default "rtl" direction for the language, if "pnb" is missing in the mapping that works for "ar", "fa", "ur", "ps", etc. This does not mean that bidi controls are needed and should be used (their usage in the Arabic script is strongly discouraged except in exceptional cases for plain text text documents and not in inline fragments that can be reassembled into longer paragraphs). So ask to the site admins to fix the layout in their CSS or code. Verdy p (talk) 12:25, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

@Verdy p, I asked you many times: Stop responding to questions that I ask other people. Your responses never have anything to do with what I asked, and they only disrupt the discussion. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:37, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

I was notified... Verdy p (talk) 13:39, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

@Bgo eiu, how is pnb different from other RTL languages? And where, for example, is it set incorrectly on Wikidata? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:38, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

@Amire80 I don't really understand how or why this is, but certain things for languages with three letter codes have to be manually enabled and I don't think there's one person who knows all the places where something should be adjusted to make it work. Just as one example that I see often, if you go here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:NewItem?uselang=pnb

And select any language other than pnb as the label language, the order of the words in the input box changes. Although I just tried this with the language set to Persian and the exact same thing happens so maybe I am underestimating the extent to which these problems also appear in other languages. The word order in Punjabi naturally tends towards "inserted" strings being the first part which may be part of why it's more apparent Bgo eiu (talk) 22:46, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

In both Punjabi-Shahmukhi and in Hebrew, I see that the placeholders in the last three input boxes are aligned incorrectly to the left, but when I click them, the text input goes correctly from right to left. HTML placeholders are generally a mess, and there's no good way to make them work perfectly in a bidirectional environment.

What's more important, however, is that pnb doesn't seem to be special.

And what's even more important is that it's not related to my original question: Why is the Arabic letter mark necessary in MediaWiki:Pipe-separator/pnb? :) Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 05:13, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

@Amire80 Like I said—I wish I remembered! But now that you've brought this up I will remember to take note next time I see something like this & check how it works in other RTL interfaces. Bgo eiu (talk) 17:48, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

OK :)

If there's no objection, I recommend deleting MediaWiki:Pipe-separator/pnb, because it should usually stay the same as the English message. I use MediaWiki in a right to left language all the time, and I've never seen any RTL issues around it. If you do see an actual RTL problem with it, let me know. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:29, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Alright, I've blanked it so I'll see if anything goes wrong Bgo eiu (talk) 14:22, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Blanking will definitely cause things to go wrong, because now it will be empty.

The right thing to do is to delete it, which I've just done. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 16:05, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

سرائیکی ترجمہ

تساں سرائیکی ترجمہ شروع کیتا ہے۔ ݙاڈھی خوشی تھئی ہے۔ تساں سرائیکی ترجمہ جاری رکھو۔ جہڑے لفظاں دا ترجمہ تھیا ہویا ہے۔ تجویز وچ آ ویندے انہاں سوکھاں لفظاں دا ترجمہ شامل کیتی رکھو، مہربانی ہوسی۔ Saraiki (talk) 16:11, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

@Saraiki ہاں جی، سرائیکی وچ میں صرف نکیاں تبدیلیاں بݨا ای سکدیاں۔ ایہتھوں پنجابی میںنوں ہور سمجھی لگی آں۔ Bgo eiu (talk) 18:32, 11 July 2023 (UTC)