Angela,
I thought about precisely the situation you describe when I composed my original message. Obviously someone who is trying to communicate with users on a wiki that's in a language they don't command should be welcomed in trying to communicate in whatever way they can.
My concern is with users who have demonstrated elsewhere that they have a perfectly adequate command of written English but who deliberately choose to not use English on certain article talk and Wikipedia project pages.
Clearly, legislating against it is not popular here. But I think we should discourage such behavior because it's clearly intentionally exclusionary. There is a point at which good faith can longer be assumed.
For example, let's say a pair of editors repeatedly revert a change I make to an article, then post some messages in a foreign language to the article talk pages as well as to their own user talk pages and the "Xyz Wikipedians' notice board". Some of these messages clearly contain my user name.
How should one respond to something like that? By politely asking that they translate their messages to English?
I'll start by posting machine translations and requesting that they be cleaned up enough to be intelligible. I doubt I'll get very far, though, because these editors are already on a campaign to defame me elsewhere on Wikipedia.
Here's to assuming good faith! :-)
- David
Angela wrote:
On 13/06/05, David Friedland david@nohat.net wrote:
I have noted an increase of discussion on English Wikipedia in languages other than English lately. For now, I'll forgo naming languages and listing particular offenders here.
Do we have a policy on this? Should we?
I don't see a need for a policy. It's a wiki, so anyone is free to add translations, or even replace the original text with English.
I regularly leave messages on talk pages and user talk pages in English on the non-English wikis (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_MediaWiki:Extlink_sample or http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:PiaCarrot#Administrator for example). Should I be banned from communicated in those places? Or should people assume good faith rather than assuming distrust and simply ask me to find someone to translate it if they feel a need to read those messages?
Angela.