Serbian Wikipedia and Kazakh Wikipedia

The Balkan states of former Yugoslavia went through dramatic changes in the 1990s, ranging from a war in the area to the creation of many different independent nations. As a result, the question of language, ethnicity, and nationality in the region is rather charged.

Serbian Wikipedia, for example, had a problem—it could be written in either Cyrillic or Latin script. The article for [[Earth]] in Serbian could be either [[3eM®a]] or [[Zemlja]].58

Cyrillic:

Latin: Zemlja je jedna od osam planeta u Suncevom sistemu. Treca je planeta po udaljenosti od Sunca i najveca terestricka planeta u Suncevom sistemu. Planeta Zemlja ima jedan prirodni satelit, Mesec. Za sada je je-dina poznata planeta na kojoj ima zivota.

ZhengZhu’s software, though, was made to be generic. All you had to do was tell it how to map X->Y and Y->X. After some smart folks made the mappings between Cyrillic and Latin, the community’s language problem was solved. At the top of Serbian Wikipedia users see two tab buttons, one for each variant.

Sadly, most people have been introduced to Kazakhstan by the fictitious Borat character and his use of a fake Kazakh language (actor Sacha Baron Cohen actually used Hebrew). The Kazakh real language is perhaps one of the most interesting ones needing the mapping feature. Sandwiched in the triangle between Russia, China, and the Middle East, the Kazakhs require not two but three different writing systems—Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic, the latter written right to left no less.59

Jer {galamsar)

While the Cyrillic alphabet still dominates, a nod to when Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union, there have been recent movements from the government to adopt the Latin alphabet instead. There are more than 1 million Kazakh speakers in China who use a script that is based on the Arabic alphabet. Fortunately, in kk.wikipedia.org, there are three tabs at the top of the screen, which allow the reader to quickly switch among these systems. While the Kazakh Wikipedia is resource-poor, with fewer than fifty active editors having produced fewer than three thousand articles, the tough problem of multiple scripts has been solved, courtesy of the cross-mapping system.

ZhengZhu’s software is a classic example of what makes a good tool—it was used in applications not even imagined by its creator.