Delirium schreef: Hoi, What the article on discrimination says is quite brief and does not include the rationalisation that you refer to. The type of discrimination that only has MDs practice medicine is one that I would suggest is one that saves lives. Not all discrimination is bad. This proposal however is. Thanks, GerardM Language discrimination People are sometimes subjected to different treatment because their preferred language <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language> is associated with a particular group, class or category. Commonly, the preferred language is just another attribute <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute> of separate ethnic groups <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_group>.

--- GerardM &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This needs to be handled with some common sense. Wikipedia editing is collaborative and done in the context of a community. Accordingly, anyone who contributes to the English Wikipedia in such a way that non-trivial interaction with other editors is required should be configured so that there's: 1) Some way to track that user using a Latin name (or even number) through page histories and such. 2) a Latin component to their signature. It doesn't matter how this is implemented, but this should be a stipulation in en policy. Otherwise it's infeasible for your average en Wikipedian to recognise and distinguish amongst non-Latin users. -- Matt Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com ___________________________________________________________ To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com

--- Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Sheesh, let's cut back on the melodrama a notch, eh? I'm not suggesting banning white people. I'm not demanding that female users must identify themselves by writing in a pink font. What I am saying is that editors who enter into non-trivial interactions on the English Wikipedia should be obliged to have a handle that can be grokked by speakers of the English language. -- Matt Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com ___________________________________________________________ Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/trueswitch2.html

--- Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes, you've told me that already. Has it really not occurred to you that the English language Wikipedia should treat the English language differently to other languages? And that when it does so, it's not wrongful discrimination? Why would I want to do that? Why are you encouraging the banning of people based on their skin colour? What are you going on about? Please attempt to be coherent. Again, you are indulging yourself in melodrama. Please stop, not least because you are trivialising genuine issues of wrongful discrimination. "A black veil darkens what used to be a more bright promise of a world"? I believe the phrase starts with "get" and ends with "a grip". -- Matt Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com ___________________________________________________________ Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/trueswitch2.html

--- Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: No, it's not. If I started replying to you in Swahili, you'd answer, if you answered at all, quite differently to if I had used English. (Making the assumption that you don't speak Swahili, of course). So you'd treat me differently based on my language. Would that be wrongful discrimination? No -- it's that you don't understand what I'm saying. This is the issue with non-Latin usernames: they can't be "understood" by all English speakers in the ways that usernames need to be "understood" for Wikipedia to function. We can rightfully require that they choose a Latin transliteration of their name and use that (or something else) if they are going to be doing stuff that requires interacting with an English-speaking community working on an English-language project. These are serious issues, but I don't think a policy about what character sets can be used in handles is really comparable. -- Matt Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com ___________________________________________________________ Now you can scan emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html

Matt R &lt;matt_crypto(a)yahoo.co.uk&gt; writes: The problem is that "speakers of the english language" seem to gravitate towards the lowest common denominator. We are writing an encyclopedia for Petes sake! Editors are supposedly in command of a skillset that's beyond burger flipping 101. If not, they have no place writing an encyclopedia anyway. Will the next demand be that interwiki targets must only be named with latin-1 characters? -- // Wegge <http://geowiki.wegge.dk/wiki/Forside> - Alt om geocaching Bruger du den gratis spamfighther ser jeg kun dine indlæg *EN* gang.

Matt R schreef: Do you really believe that people remember who they worked with last year on an article? Given the sheer multitude of people only a tiny core of people are known. They are the "power users" of a project. Come on, so you can call them thingybobs, the right name for this attitude is discrimination. People are demanding things; they want to be known by their own user ID. The one that they use on their own project as well. You on the other hand deny them that they can. You may recall that this is a flare up of something that was discussed last month. You may want to read back what an impact it had on the Japanese Wikipedia. You may want to read how much one of our most valuable Wikimedians was distressed by this attitude. Thanks, Gerard

On 29/01/07, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Actually, to a large extent they do. Remember that most articles in en:wp have been shown (Greg Maxwell ran the numbers in January 2006) to be largely written by only a few users. I remember that you were the sole voice against having them identifiable to other users who did not happen to be able to read that script. It is not realistic to require of all editors on the English Wikipedia to be able to read every script in all of Unicode to be able to work with others on a project written in a Latin script language. - d.

On 30/01/07, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes, but that's easy for users of Latin characters because your name is written in Latin characters. That's not an example of the problem. - d.

David Gerard wrote: Let's make some practical examples of users with bona fide non-latin usernames (choosing a different script only to look cool may be another issue): Some (maybe most) will practically only add interwikis - they may or may not speak English, they won't care about the community, maybe in the past they would have put the interwikis anonimously and with SUL they find a reason to edit with a username. Basically they just help, they don't cause trouble and pretty much who cares if you don't recognise them. If they add at a vaguely fast rate, patrollers will easily realise that it's always the same guy. If you use CDVF you may just whitelist them so you won't be bothered in future. A few (very few, hopefully) are vandals, they will just vandalise pages like any other vandal. You block them indefinitely, there's nothing racist in it. Some of them will occasionally contribute a bit more substantially, they may occasionally put a signature on some talk pages. You may ask them to do something to be recognisable, they may or may not do it. Finally, some of them will be really active contributors. I would find rather fair that these people are asked to put something that makes them recognisable in their signature. If they're active users, the request would probably seem quite reasonable. Now, I guess it would be more useful to have something that makes usernames recognisable from the Recentchanges or Histories, rather than signatures. If you want to appear as someone else, you would make your signature very similar - and with non-Latin characters it's even easier. ID Numbers are pretty ugly, it would still be quite hard to recognise 12345678 from 12354678. Automatic transliteration is not really an option AFAIK, and ask the user to provide a version of the username in another script is unrealistic (I wouldn't have a clue on how to write my username in Arabic or Chinese - nor I would actually see a reason to do so, although I occasionally have added a couple of interwikis on these projects). Personally, as soon as they don't choose the local equivalent of User:F**k, I don't really care how they call my username in a funny script. Marco (Cruccone)

Delirium schreef: Hoi, Even when people propose thing with the best of intentions, it does not make that what they propose is right. It is exactly when you do not listen to arguments any more that bigotry is shown. The problem for me is that the very basis of what is proposed is wrong. At issue is that people want a policy that insists on people renaming themselves for their convenience. You can ASK people to do this, but you can not INSIST on this. This is the fine line that we walk. Given how bigot is defined: "A bigot is a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from their own. " I might qualify because I am prejudiced because to me this /is /discrimination pure and simple and I do have little tolerance for that. Given that you apparently use use a killfile, you may indeed nominate yourself as well. Then again, when you indeed do use a killfile, you may never learn that you do. Thanks, GerardM

--- Anders Wegge Jakobsen &lt;wegge(a)wegge.dk&gt; wrote: Non-Latin usernames make distinguishing and recognising users *much* harder. How many different fonts do I have to install to cover all possible squiggles? On all OSes on all my computers? Can I install these fonts on my old Unix terminal? (Yes, I do use it for Wikipedia...) Can I install fonts on the computers at my local library and Internet cafe? (Answer: No.) Do you expect people less familiar with technology to know how to do this, or even that there exists some way to resolve those question marks? Which will someone remember longer: "User:JoeBloggs" or "User:some_weird_glyph"? The inconvenience to en: Wikipedians is quite out of proportion to the convenience of not having to spend the thirty seconds creating a Latin-1 username. I'm not going to spend any more of my dwindling Wikipedia time on this, fun as it is being put in the same moral category as racists and misogynists and sneered at for lacking a universal knowledge of the world's writing systems. Actually, I'm just free to call a strawman a strawman. Watch carefully and I'll do it again! How to win an argument: 1. Make an obvious strawman argument. 2. Wait for someone to call you on it. 3. Agree to concede that it's a strawman only if the person you're arguing with concedes your main point. 4. ???? 5. Profit! -- Matt Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com ___________________________________________________________ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html

--- Anders Wegge Jakobsen &lt;wegge(a)wegge.dk&gt; wrote: We can presume that this would not normally be particularly difficult if I was going to be having non-trivial interactions with other editors on the Chinese Wikipedia -- the context under discussion if you have been following the thread. I'm sad that you feel abuse is an acceptable method of arguing your point. I presume it's because your rational arguments are exhausted. In any case, this conversation is over. -- Matt Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com ___________________________________________________________ What kind of emailer are you? Find out today - get a free analysis of your email personality. Take the quiz at the Yahoo! Mail Championship. http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk

On 30 Jan 2007 01:32:52 +0100, Anders Wegge Jakobsen &lt;wegge(a)wegge.dk&gt; wrote: The gloabalized world speaks english. However in this case we will accept pretty much anything in the English alphabet. At random I don't think Bjankuloski06en is english we tend not to include numbers withint words. Tricky since it doesn't have a defined pronouceation in english. either 的复数 or perhaps 名 移动式起重机;纺织机;雌驴等 -- geni

Delirium schreef: Hoi, With people using their own script for their user name, it does not detract a thing from the information being in English on the English language Wikipedia. Thanks, GerardM

Delirium schreef: Hoi, Using words like jackass in this contexts implies calling those who do not agree with you being a jackass. Thanks, GerardM I prefer to being called a jackass by you than considering my behaviour to be discriminatory by myself.

Gerard Meijssen wrote: I don't think ridiculous and intellectually dishonest hyperbole are necessary. In particular, to use your terminology, you are darkening the world with discrimination as well. The choice is whether to discriminate against users who would prefer to work in an environment where they recognize the scripts, or against users who would prefer to use a script different than the local Wikipedia. Obviously one of them must be done, and this is a matter of pragmatics and which policy we think is best, not of "discrimination" to use your ridiculous and frankly idiotic terminology. -Mark

Andrew Gray schreef: 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

David Gerard schreef: Hoi, So you lost this argument by referring to Nazis for the first time. Thanks, GerardM

David Gerard schreef: Hoi, Actually that is a misinterpretation; what was asked and what I explained there was why there is such an aversion to using numbers to deal with people. Now let us forget about this as it is not productive and I think we both want to do good. We do not agree on what is good but this does not make either of us a Nazi. Thanks, GerarM