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

[Sam Korn]

On 12/21/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Are there any en.WP editors who believe blocking users
> on sight based on their font is not a useful enough
> process to be worth breaking SUL for other editors?
>
> Is there anyone outside of en.WP who believes that SUL
> is not a useful enough process to be worth creating
> bad blood between wikis?

Hang on now.  This is a gross oversimplification of the problems that
this issue is caused by.

Firstly, SUL is a *good thing*.  It will make contributing to
Wikimedia easier and more convenient.  I am certain that the *vast*
majority of people agree with this and totally support its
implementation.

However, there are issues that it raises.  No-one wants good editors
from, say, the Arabic Wikipedia getting blocked from en.wikipedia
because their usernames are incomprehensible to other users of the
wiki.  But, on the other hand, there are many Wikipedians who can only
read the Latin script (let's face it, this is the vast majority).
Should they be expected to identify a username with a user when the
username is incomprehensible to them?

I can't read Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or Thai scripts.  I would find
it *extremely* difficult to tell the difference between a user I knew
and a vandal if their names were in one of these scripts.  This is
obviously a big problem.  You can't dismiss this in the manner of "oh,
those English Wikipedians, they should get over it."

This is a serious problem, and other wikis will suffer from it if they
get the same concentration of vandalism as the English Wikipedia.  It
must not be dismissed.

So let's try to satisfy both the need to implement SUL and the
problems that this raises.  The current en.wikipedia policy uses a
sledgehammer to crack a walnut, that's true enough.   But rather than
ignoring these concerns, how about looking to make this policy
unnecessary?

-- 
Sam