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

[Andre Engels]

2006/12/22, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com>:
>
> On 12/22/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > How many users are working at any one time at en.wikipedia? And you can
> > remember the vandals by name .. I am impressed .. but somehow I doubt
> > it. I think you use the history views of the contributions of that user,
> > the talk pages of that user and for that you do not even have to know
> > what the user name is.
>
> OK, think about this.  I'm looking at Special:Recentchanges.  I see an
> edit by [[User:David Gerard]].  I ignore this edit.  It's David.  I
> know he's a good editor.  Now I see an edit by [[User:Fabien1309]],
> who is a fr admin who has a rarely-used en account.  I don't recognise
> him, but I see the edit, see it's a good one, and he goes on my mental
> whitelist.
>
> Now I see [[User:ผู้ใช้:ธวัชชัย]], who is an admin on th.  I look at
> the edit, and it's a good one.  But how am I to whitelist him/her?
> It's impossible, or near enough.  And the same would go for ja, zh, or
> el (I can read Greek script, but I'm in the definite minority...)


How large is this mental whitelist of yours? If you have normal mental
capabilities it will be hard to have more than 150-200 names on it. That's
merely a bump in the total Wikipedia usage feature. The statistics of
English Wikipedia seem to be down at the moment, but according to the
Wikistats, German Wikipedia had 1000 'very active' (at least 100 edits in a
month) and 7500 'active' (at least 5 edits in a month). Remember 200 of
them, and you still will find a majority of those edits being made by
active-yet-unknown users.

> And for all the ????? you only have to have to install the appropriate
> > fonts .. You are talking about self inflicting damage that you roll over
> > on people that have earned respect. From the point of good faith, it is
> > hardly that.
>
> So now, in order to contribute helpfully to vandal-fighting (for
> instance) in a Wikipedia in someone's own language, they have to
> install all world fonts.  Yes.  That will really encourage people to
> join up.


Vandal fighting is done by checking the edits, not by trying to pronounce
the name of the editor.


-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels