[Foundation-l] English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects other communities

[Neil Harris]

Stephen Bain wrote:
> On 12/20/06, Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> I can understand the rationale for this policy, but it _is_
>> ethnocentric, and it counters the problem from the wrong side, if you
>> know what I mean. Instead of trying to fix the problem, they try to
>> remove it.
>>     
>
> I think it's horribly rude for the other admins on en: to be blocking
> people for using non-Latin characters in their username. A more polite
> approach would be to ask them to add a transliteration to their
> signature, that would satisfy many people.
>
> The problem is fairly simple, people who speak only English don't
> bother installing language support on their computers, even though
> (AFAIK) it is included with all operating systems these days. All they
> need to do is get their installation CD out and turn it on.
>
>   

The major problem is that, to most Latin-script-only contributors cannot 
accurately memorize or distinguish many non-Latin names. For example, 
the average Western user cannot clearly visualize -- or communicate to 
others -- the differences between (chosen at random) 漢, 源, and 装, all 
of which look remarkably similar to them, even though they are 
immediately and obviously distinguishable by any Chinese reader.

Since Wikipedia needs names to be human-recognizable in order to 
function, this needs fixing, and since it is impractical to educate all 
Wikipedia contributors to literacy in all major world script systems, 
transliteration -- or some other disambiguation system -- will be 
necessary in order to make names distinct to human readers who are 
unfamiliar with other writing systems.

Possibility 1:

For example, a user with the Japanese name 武 could add a Latin-script 
transliteration ("Takeshi"), and appear on Latin-script wikis as

[[User:武 (Takeshi)]]

or possibly:

[[User:Takeshi (武)]]

Of course, to avoid any appearance of linguistic imperialism, the same 
facility should be available for users with Latin-script names to add 
transliterations in other scripts.

Possibility 2:

All usernames could have their internal Wikipedia IDs appended, perhaps 
in the form of hex numbers, allowing them to be uniquely identified, 
regardless of the culture of the readers, providing only that they can 
read hex digits. For example:

武 (x610d49)

Ideally, a unique fixed-length hash of the internal ID number would be 
used, to avoid the emergence of a "pecking order" based on one user 
having an earlier-issued ID number than another.

-- Neil