Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wikipedia Outreach

Hello. I'm a recently appointed admin of Chuvash Wikipedia and I look forward to working with you. We do have some issues that need experts' attention (most of them technical). Flagellvm·Dei 17:14, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Brilliant to know! Would you mind letting the Chuvash equivalent of the Administrator's Noticeboard/Community Portal know about us? we're looking for suggestions on how we can help. Any such suggestions should be posted here or sent to the email address of one of the involved people. Ironholds (talk) 19:10, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I've dropped a line in our technical forum saying you're ready to help us :-) I'll try to post my suggestions tomorrow. Flagellvm·Dei 18:40, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, Russian Wikipedia also has a special project for outreach and coordination of efforts among smaller Wikipedias like ours. Here's the link. Flagellvm·Dei 18:46, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ooh, brilliant. I'll get in contact, since there was a nice English-speaking Russian girl at Wikimania who did a presentation on small and medium wikis. Ironholds (talk) 19:23, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I'm here, sorry for the delay.
I guess one of our biggest problems is that we have to use a mix of Latin and Cyrillic characters in Wikipedia and all other Chuvash sites across the net. Our modern alphabet is basically same as Russian, but it also includes four Chuvash-specific letters: Ӑӑ, Ӗӗ, Ҫҫ, Ӳӳ. And since most of them are specific to our language only, nobody really cares to add corresponding characters to the default (web)fonts, and these letters sometimes fail to show up in certain configurations and browsers. For this reason, we stick to using Latin lookalike characters: Ăă, Ĕĕ, Çç, Ÿÿ.
Is there any way to fix this? By the way, it is not only our problem: Ossetian Wikipedia also uses Danish characters Ӕӕ instead of Cyrillic ones for the same reason as we do. Flagellvm·Dei 10:20, 24 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The MediaWiki:Common.css file allows you to alter the font in which Wikipedia is displayed in browsers; you could change it to a font which contains the Chuvash or Ossetian characters. Ironholds (talk) 14:21, 24 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid that none of the default fonts used in Windows XP contain all of our characters. Is it possible to upload custom font on user's machine (via CSS or any other means) and then run it? Flagellvm·Dei 17:03, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Not as far as I'm aware, unless you could somehow work it into the cached information. If you've got IRC, #wikimedia-tech is where all the server techies hang out; they might be able to provide more help. I'm afraid our thoughts for how we could help smaller wikis were all on the community and content side of things :). Ironholds (talk) 18:29, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
OK, sorry. I'll ask the techies then. Do you have any general advice for us? Flagellvm·Dei 19:55, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]