Waerth, I am sorry to see you in trouble. I would like you to remind people tend to hesitate to express their reaction for several reasons. Complexity of problems, feeling as outsiders (in the view of mentioned issues) and so on. And as SJ pointed out, even if you have received not so many responces as you would have expected, your postings to foundation-l hasn't been completely ignored.
On 10/25/06, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that projects should look more towards cooperation with others -- other languages and other types of projects. You are right that lack of cooperation is a problem.
Sure, I would like to add it could happen even if all involved parties are on a good faith. One can be ethnocentric and still on a good faith; good faith based on unproper idea can cause disasterous end, that is a moral of history. And we won't always know what our deeds fruit.
En:wp has a policy as of this year not to allow usernames with non-latin character sets. I have no idea where that came from, but it is a shame.
It could be forseeable though, my complaint about its cultural centricism and disrespect for non Western culture that was simply rejected because they allowed us non Westerners still to edit on that project, so it was not discriminative. I think I heard similar statements once somewhere else in documents in the age of colonialism, and it is for me enough to decide to leave it.
Also, I am very shocked no one didn't alert us about that when we were going to reject vote eligiblity to the people who were blocked indefinitely from somewhere else. There were, in fact, people who shouldn't be treated as such, since their guilty of banning was only they used their usernames in their own scripts. Fortunately or unfortunately I haven't seen votes from such people as Election Official; so now I fear if we Election Officials sent a wrong sign for those people who had accepted such sanctions and didn't oppose.
On the other hand, English Wikipedians seem not to feel guilty to block trusted people of Wikimedia project only in the reason they didn't prefer their usernames. That is a surprise for me and I would like to say there are fearing SUL would bring them their current policy to apply all the project. As past Election Official, I stress the coming change should encourage "one user, one account" policy - or the next Election cannot be feasable. Even in this year, hand counting was a stressful nightmare. And the English Wikipedia policy would be an obstacle to ensure such a policy unless it will be changed.
I expect English Wikipedians change their mind and become aware Wikipedia project consists in diversity, and also I expect such kind of ethnocentrism is only a phenomenon on English Wikipedia and not on other English projects.