Isn't this an issue that should be resolved at the Unicode level, instead of as a hack on MediaWiki (or even more narrow as the bug states "on the Romanian language Wikipedia") level?

gutza wrote:

In the end, yes. But for now, native support for those Unicode characters is only provided in Windows Vista and similarly recent operating systems from other vendors. Windows XP does provide limited support for the new characters as well starting with SP2, although it typically renders them using a specific font (the result being that text looks a bit awkward -- "crâșmăriță" for instance would highlight the issue for Windows XP users; compare "crâşmăriţă"). Older operating systems from Microsoft do not provide support at all for the proper symbols. What's more, Windows Vista is the first operating system from Microsoft that provides native support for writing using these symbols.

Given all of the above, many of us in the Romanian community think that full transition to the correct diacritical signs is premature at this point. However, I believe we could reach consensus for a solution like the one shown here, sooner rather than later; in addition, this will most probably be an intermediary step at some point anyway.

Can't this be done as a simple JavaScript gadget?

Advising to close as invalid, or chancing the scope to Wikimedia/Something.

1. We have no man power to do this.
2. Transliteration has its own problems.
3. Unless the new keyboards are producing only the correct ones, the old ones could be converted to new ones using JavaScript gadget.
4. If we enabled the conversion in MediaWiki, it would be very hard to get it turned off some day.
5. This is likely to affect every existing website, in which case more general solution should be done.