MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: Hebrew and Amharic
speakers now have dedicated wiki pages to share their experiences as a part
of the global evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) being done
by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

"Since its launch
in October 2007, the IDN wiki has helped ICANN and the Internet community
look at exactly how IDNs operate in the root, and how different software handles
domain names in characters from different scripts," said Tina Dam, ICANN’s
IDN Program Director. "We’re hoping that Internet users who understand Hebrew
and Amharic will access these wiki pages and share their experiences."

The
IDN wiki was initially based on 11 example.test domains in Arabic, Persian,
Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish,
Japanese and Tamil. The wiki allows Internet users to establish their own
subpages with their own names in their own language such as example.test/yourname.

Though the new languages will not be used for translations of example.test
in the Internet’s root, they will be used at the fourth level (after the
top level “org”, the second level “icann”, and the third level “idn”) so users
can have dedicated wiki pages. These language extensions to the wiki are
available at http://am.idn.icann.org and http://he.idn.icann.org.

As well, with the Hebrew addition, since there is a .test TLD label in Hebrew
script, an additional address has been assigned in the Hebrew language — http://דוגמא.טעסט.
(If this link doesn’t work in your browser, you can access an embedded link
at http://idn.icann.org/Hebrew_script.)

"We have been able to add these languages to the wiki because of interest
from the community and the availability of a volunteer moderator fluent in
the language to spend time with the wiki support team to localize the language
area and work with users," added Dam. "Anyone interested in adding new languages
can contact me directly at [email protected]."