From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Wed Jul 06 2005 - 19:21:05 CDT
asadek@st-elias.com wrote:
>
>
> Sounds a bit like a veto to me and not seeking consensus, was the
> advice of the WG2 members even sought?
>
I think the more interesting question is: what is the composition of
these mysterious bodies? How many native speakers of ______ (fill in
your favorite language) are members? How many of them use the ____
language on a daily basis? That statistic would be much more revealing
than which committee agreed with which, IMHO.
To me, at least, "UTC" and "WG3098098534543" seem to be very fearsome
creatures, not so different from the politburo. I'm not saying they
*are* like that. I guess I'm saying they have a PR problem.
More generally: how's about the Unicode Consortium, with it's unlimited
resources, creates an outreach program? Or maybe even an internship
program targeting minority language communities? Maybe it's been done.
Still something doesn't smell right about a "universal" encoding whose
mailing list consists almost exclusively of westerners. Inevitably
questions like "well, who made that decision?" will arise. Would it not
be worth a little bit of money to try to find members of minority
linguistic communities and make a special effort to make them feel
welcome? (BTW, I have occasionally received emails from people in the
Arab world regarding issues brought up on this list. It seems
reasonable to conclude they don't feel comfortable contributing
directly, partly because of linguistic difficulties. But I strongly
suspect part of the reason is this list is, to be honest, not a very
friendly place.) This seems like a problem to me.
-g
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