On 8/14/07, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
Simetrical-3 wrote:
Personally I dislike that provision. It means that no one who wants to use their account on (for instance) enwiki can use a non-Latin name *anywhere*, unless they use two Single-Login accounts (heh).
Why ever not?
There has been some noise recently about people using non-Latin scripts who have fallen foul of over-anxious complainants worried that the names might be saying something rude in the non-English language to which they belong, but AFAIK there is no hard-and-fast rule.
Ah, it seems it was changed a bit:
Users with non-Latin usernames are welcome to edit in Wikipedia. However, scripts of non-Latin languages (such as Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Thai and others) are illegible to most other contributors of the English Wikipedia. As a courtesy to the rest of the contributors, users with such usernames are encouraged to help them navigate by means of Latin signatures, Latin user redirects, and an explanation on their userpage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy#Non-Latin_usernames
Last I heard, which may have been some months ago, non-Latin usernames were being flat-out blocked on sight. Not because they might be offensive or anything, but because English-speaking admins would be unable to tell them apart in the event of vandalism, etc. There was a big fuss about it from some non-Latin-alphabet-using wikis. The current wording seems like a good compromise to me, and should make this not so much of an issue. But it would still be nice for people to be able to contribute in local-language usernames if desired, IMO. Not, in any case, a blocker feature: get it working first. :)