[Foundation-l] Throwing some data onto the flamefest fire (was: English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects other communities)

[Gregory Maxwell]

Regarding, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/nonalphausers

On 12/21/06, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> If you want this to be meaningful, you need to remove accounts with only
> Arabic numbers. Obviously these can be recognized easily by English-only
> speakers.

Some are, some are not. 863929163 is not too easily remembered,
although I can type it. While 555 is a fine name for an English
speaker to communicate with... Feel free to skip over the ones that
seem too English compatible. With 1000 in the list there are plenty to
look at.

> > Obviously it does not count users who were blocked before they could
> > "contribute".
>
> This would be useful too, as a separate list, maybe.

Based on your suggestions I have created a new list consisting of all
usernames which have been blocked since Dec 2005 that contain any
non-ascii characters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/nonalphausers/blocked

They have been grouped based on the existence of edits by the users.

It would be useful if someone would go through and fix the places
where a loose RTL character is making everything backwards (don't
remove the RTL mark, just insert a matching LTR mark).  I have no idea
how people edit mixed directional text with any ease, and I can't seem
to find help on any of our metapages.

Of 3,049,903 usernames in the enwiki database 454,122 contain at least
one non-ascii character. Of those, 2,016 have been blocked at least
once in the last year.

Of the 454,122 accounts with non-ascii characters 367,501 were created
in the last year.

I am somewhat surprised that so much fervor is being made of a matter
which appears, by the numbers, to of nearly insignificant frequency.