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

[Rory Stolzenberg]

On 12/20/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
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> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > What Aphaia means is that people have asked to change their Japanese
> > name because of the insistence of the English project that people have a
> > Latin name. With the long hoped for single login this policy of the
> > English Wikipedia HAS to go the way of the dinosaur. It is unfortunate
> > that this policy is still active.
>
> No such policy exists, far as I know. If some vigilante group is trying
> to enforce it, they need to be told that Wikipedia and Wikimedia have no
> such restriction.
>
> Of course people are free to change their usernames if they wish.
>
> - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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I also thought that the blocks were just done by admins and weren't actually
in policy, but it turns out that [[en:WP:USERNAME]] does indeed say "*Names
with non-Latin <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet>
characters:*Unfortunately, most of your fellow editors will be unable
to read a name
written in Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or other scripts. Many of
them will also be additionally burdened, as such names may be displayed for
them only as question marks ("??? ??"), squares ("□□□ □□"), replacement
characters ("??? ??") or worse, nonsense or
mojibake<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake>("Ã!%ôs*"). If your
name is usually written in a non-Latin script, please
consider transliterating <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration> it
to avoid confusion, and allow easier access to your talk page by typing your
name in the search field or URL bar." under the "Inappropriate usernames"
section. I'm about to go through the history to see when it was added.