[Foundation-l] Sigh, problems with non-Latin usernames again

Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen at gmail.com
Tue Jan 30 09:03:40 UTC 2007


Andrew Gray schreef:
> On 30/01/07, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Single User Login is enabled on Wikia... hum... I think that this policy
>> from English Wikipedia is one of the reasons for this don't get enabled so
>> quick on Wikimedia
>>     
>
> There is no requirement, of course, that SUL means "have the username
> display the same way everywhere". Even if any given username only has
> one person behind it, it doesn't stop us declaring the "real user" to
> be an arbitrary database code and hanging a dozen visible usernames
> off that... ;-)
>
> [I would utterly love a hack which allowed you to ask for any
> non-Latin username - or perhaps any username - to have an arbitrary
> User-ID appended to the back of it - "foobar" or "foobar (123456)" -
> whenever it showed up in logs. Those who find it useful can flip a
> switch and on it comes; those who don't, well, it'd be off by default)
>
> But looking back over the thread, there is an awful lot of stupidity
> and - not to put too fine a point on it - desire To Make A Fuss being
> demonstrated here. Tthe proposal is not some grand racist conspiracy
> to prevent contributions from non-Anglophones. The proposal is to ask
> them, *when they sign things on discussion pages*, to use a
> transliteration. It's a proposal to solve a problem that doesn't yet
> significantly exist - we'd do much better to BAN PEOPLE WITH GIANT
> COLOURED FOUR-LINE SIGNATURES, if you ask me - so not a desperately
> helpful one, but it really doesn't deserve this much screaming. We
> have bigger problems to worry about.
>
> Please, people, cool off a little...
Hoi,
You have your terminology wrong. Nobody said anything about this being 
racist, it is discriminatory. Compulsory transliteration will not work 
either because it will not satisfy the uniqueness criterion. The notion 
that this problem does not significantly exist is wrong as well. See 
what Aphaia wrote about it when this subject was raised last time.

Feel free to ban people with giant four line signatures. Nothing wrong 
with that imho.

Thanks,
    GerardM




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