I don't know if IPA would work... I mean for all we know, "Bob" could have some random pronounciation of "ko-ho-ba-fay-jo-muh". When it comes to storing it in the database, I agree it should be some uniform script, like a Federation Standard of sorts...

I think the most important part of the objection to "foreign" character sets is that many people on en in particular are unaware of what facilities exist for dealing with them. As people in countries using Latin character sets rarely see, and almost never have to work with anything that's in another character set, they are usually unaware of what tools exists for interoperating with them. This is especially true when abusive users have deliberately taken advantage of this fact in order to make the lives of administrators and of other Wikipedians as difficult as possible, and it's also true for those handful of users that will mix character sets to "look cool" at the inconvenience of others. The fact that usernames in foreign character sets pose special technical challenges for users unfamiliar with them, and that mainstream multilingual support is especially lacking in applications with a Latin language family ethnocentricity (in particular large number of Windows applications and Windows itself, at least for en-US locale), means that functions for working with usernames need to be looked at carefully. One of the more obvious ways that this can be made to work is to make numeric userids more visible and more useful for various operations where a username may be near impossible to type, and may even be difficult to see. I'd strongly recommend this for usernames using characters outside the ranges that a typical user on a given project will be able to enter with a "normal" input method. Displaying something like User:???????? <#2352562> would help considerably for those situations, but it needs to work consistently for things like accessing talk pages, accessing contributions, accessing userpages, and accessing logs. "Nicknames" or aliases, as proposed by someone else in this thread would also help - they could be constrained to the characters typically usable on a given wiki. I'd also suggest that when showing a "non-native" username, that we indicate clearly what character set or even what language it's in, this will become even more useful once SUL is implemented (hopefully it's going to be part of SUL anyway, dealing with namespace collisions otherwise will be insane.) Transliterations would be useful in some situations, but I'd suggest we make this a display option - to be respectful of other cultures means that we should respect their writing and their culture wherever possible. IPA could be handled in the same way, and this would probably be appreciated by at least a few people who would otherwise be confused on how to pronounce a given name. Would a format for usernames with foreign characters like "User:???????? (Arabic) <#2352562>" really be so bad? (This would apply equally to projects where latin characters might not be displayable). -Stephanie

2006/12/21, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: A minor point, but... What about the people who edit from computers on which they can not install software? Public computers, computers at work, the parents' or boyfriends' computer. Lots of people do this from time to time. Then we have people like me. I've tried a couple of times to get Japanese characters in my box simply because I think it would be cool but I have failed, maybe because my OS is old and stuff is not supported any more - maybe because I just did it wrong. (No info on how to do that in this thread, please. I promise you, the first three things you'll tell me I have already tried - and it does not belong on this list, anyhow.) /HB _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

At issue is that the function of NOT seeing the characters, hence the ??????, is a function of your local system. It is easily remedied by installing fonts. These are for the majority of languages available as part of your operating system.

James Hare wrote: Even "ko-ho-ba-fay-jo-muh" is better than ???????? Of course, we could always take the approach of putting them in IPA, thus annoying everyone equally. -- Neil

On 21/12/06, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Indeed. But we're not going to be able to make it a requirement of editing en:wp that users install more fonts on their (arguably broken) default-install Windows box. - d.

On 21/12/06, Neil Harris &lt;usenet(a)tonal.clara.co.uk&gt; wrote: Obviously, with SUL any en:wp editor who does not learn to read all other scripts used on Wikimedia is simply being a cultural imperialist. - d.

David Gerard schreef: left, Hoi, There is at the moment a big row brewing over the way the Internet insists on having URLs in Latin script. People who do not write in Latin have to use Latin to be able to use the Internet. This notion of being able to enter URLs in your own script is really intuitive. When this change is going to be implemented you will still be able to access the websites that will no longer be available with a Latin script. It will be a big change when it happens, this issue raised about the insistence of the English language Wikipedia is a harbinger of many more issues that will come. Thanks, GerardM

On 21/12/06, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Indeed. But we're not going to be able to make it a requirement of editing en:wp that users install more fonts on their (arguably broken) default-install Windows box. - d.

David Gerard schreef: Hoi, You do not have to make it a requirement as it is their option to upgrade their system with better font support. As there is a reasonable solution that is open to people, it is unreasonable to expect others to accommodate them by insisting on having a transliteration, a Latin nick, having people appear to be a number.\

James Hare wrote: If we can make it as simple as that (and acknowledge that the automatic transliteration will often be very, very, bad) we could possibly make this work, with the option to change your nick to something else later. Perhaps language -> IPA -> language might be a good way of helping the m x n problem for this, in which case we could use language <-> IPA tables to bootstrap this. Would this be a good idea, or would it be linguistic nonsense?

Neil Harris wrote: Probably linguistic nonsense. Although it serves a very useful purpose in conveying pronunciations, anly a limited community interested in linguistics will be familiar with it. For everybody else (which to be fair must include the English speakers) it amounts to attaining equality by putting everything into a common language which all will equally not understand. :-) Ec _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

What I would like to know is how a machine will be able to deduce a pronounciation through a username. On 12/24/06, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: >Neil Harris wrote: > > >>If we can make it as simple as that (and acknowledge that the automatic >>transliteration will often be very, very, bad) we could possibly make >>this work, with the option to change your nick to something else later. >> >>Perhaps language -> IPA -> language might be a good way of helping the m >>x n problem for this, in which case we could use language <-> IPA tables >>to bootstrap this. >> >>Would this be a good idea, or would it be linguistic nonsense? >> >> >Probably linguistic nonsense. Although it serves a very useful purpose >in conveying pronunciations, anly a limited community interested in >linguistics will be familiar with it. For everybody else (which to be >fair must include the English speakers) it amounts to attaining equality >by putting everything into a common language which all will equally not >understand. :-) >