Help:Turkish characters

This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page or start a discussion on the community forum.

Note: The information on this page applies only to Wikis that do not use the UTF-8 encoding yet. All Wikimedia wikis now use UTF-8.

The Turkish alphabet contains six letters not present in ISO 8859-1, and that will therefore present problems for Wikipedia use: Dotted uppercase "I", dotless lowercase "i", upper- and lowercase "G" with breve accent, and upper- and lowercase "S" with cedilla.

Turkish computers may use character set ISO 8859-9 ("Latin 5"), which is identical to Latin 1 except that the rarely-used Icelandic characters "eth", "thorn", and "y with acute accent" are replaced with the needed Turkish characters. If you are reading Turkish text in Wikipedia, when you see these Icelandic characters they are probably meant to be the Turkish ones (users with Turkish computers may or may not see them properly). If you are entering Turkish text into Wikipedia, be aware that the Bomis server identifies web pages as ISO 8859-1, and there is no way to override this, so even if these characters appear correct to you, they are not properly encoded from the point of view of a non-Turkish Wiki reader.

Further, HTML 4.0 does not specify named character entities for these characters, so they cannot be entered into Wikipedia text in any portable way except 16-bit Unicode numeric character entity references, which only work in recent browsers, despite being the official standard. If using Turkish text on a non utf-8 wiki consider anglicizing these characters. If you really must enter Turkish words with these characters into such wikis, to maintain data integrity at the expense of readability, use the following codes (the characters themselves appear after each code so you can see what your browser does with them):

This is a test text : IĞŞİşiğüöç

HTML code		character	Description
Ğ	Ğ	Ğ	Uppercase "G" with breve accent
İ	İ	İ	Uppercase dotted "I"
Ş	Ş	Ş	Uppercase "S" with cedilla
ğ	ğ	ğ	Lowercase "g" with breve accent
ı	ı	ı	Lowercase dotless "i"
ş	ş	ş	Lowercase "s" with cedilla

These codes will probably appear correctly on most current browsers, but fail in archaic versions, even though they are according to standards. They are, however, totally unambiguous, and so will appear correctly as users upgrade to more compliant software. IE 5.0 on Windows NT, for example, does display these using the standard supplied Unicode fonts, as do Mozilla and Opera. Their incorrect appearance on older browsers such as older versions of netscape (4.x had problems with unicode entities in non-unicode pages) may be acceptable in some situations, such as when an anglicized name is followed by a parenthesized Turkish equivalent as extra information not crucial to the article itself.

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