Community Tech/Section heading URLs for non-Latin languages

The Section heading URLs for non-Latin languages project aims to fix a problem that's very annoying for Wikimedia contributors in non-Latin languages -- that URLs pointing to section headings replace each character with incomprehensible four-character codes, and section headings can't be linked to directly.

This page documents a project the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team has worked on or declined in the past. Technical work on this project is complete.

We invite you to join the discussion on the talk page. You may track this project's progress on T75092.

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T75092

Important links

Status

March 14, 2018

This has been fixed and deployed everywhere! So if you go to https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Федерация_(космический_корабль)#Посадка, you do see the section ID in unicode and not percent-encoded as was the case peviously. This works with almost all modern browsers.

March 7, 2017

After some investigation, the consensus seems to be that the best way forward is to implement Unicode section IDs and percent-encoded fragments in MediaWiki URLs. For backwards-compatibility with existing saved URLs, we would add empty span tags with the old dot-encoded section IDs.

We already know that this implementation works with all current browsers, but we need to see how far back the support goes. Test percent-encoded fragments and Unicode section IDs (i.e. anchors) on all available browser versions until it is determined which version of each is the oldest to support this implementation. The team is currently working on cataloguing the browser support. (phab ticket T157729)