Regarding, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/nonalphausers

On 12/21/06, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:

If you want this to be meaningful, you need to remove accounts with only Arabic numbers. Obviously these can be recognized easily by English-only speakers.

Some are, some are not. 863929163 is not too easily remembered, although I can type it. While 555 is a fine name for an English speaker to communicate with... Feel free to skip over the ones that seem too English compatible. With 1000 in the list there are plenty to look at.

...

Obviously it does not count users who were blocked before they could "contribute".

This would be useful too, as a separate list, maybe.

Based on your suggestions I have created a new list consisting of all usernames which have been blocked since Dec 2005 that contain any non-ascii characters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/nonalphausers/blocked

They have been grouped based on the existence of edits by the users.

It would be useful if someone would go through and fix the places where a loose RTL character is making everything backwards (don't remove the RTL mark, just insert a matching LTR mark). I have no idea how people edit mixed directional text with any ease, and I can't seem to find help on any of our metapages.

Of 3,049,903 usernames in the enwiki database 454,122 contain at least one non-ascii character. Of those, 2,016 have been blocked at least once in the last year.

Of the 454,122 accounts with non-ascii characters 367,501 were created in the last year.

I am somewhat surprised that so much fervor is being made of a matter which appears, by the numbers, to of nearly insignificant frequency.