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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 12/22/06, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
> Gianluigi is right to assert the issue for the Italian Wikipedia: this isn't
> a auto-block, first the users talks). But sorry Gregory, English Wikipedia
> really make auto-blocks until no first talk.

There are over 400,000 usernames on enwiki with non-ascii characters
in them. Only 3,394 usernames with non-ascii characters have been
blocked on enwiki.

Enwiki is big enough to find single examples to support virtually any claim.

Furthermore, you first example is only furthering the argument that
enwiki's policy is not ethnocentric.

Can you tell me what "language" that symbol would be a reasonable name in?

To save you the time in researching, I'll just tell you: Thats the
symbol used in logic for negation... it's not a sane name in any
language.

On enwiki the permission to use non-latin characters for names will
result in far more native English speakers using 'cute' characters for
their names and presenting an unreasonable burden on the community
then it will result in speakers of other languages being able to use
their preferred name. This is the case simply because of the relative
numbers of users from each class who edit the English
Wikipedia[http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin].

An ideal solution would avoid causing trouble for speakers of
non-native languages when they edit outside their home language
projects while simultaneously avoiding an unnecessary proliferation of
locally inconvenient names.

I don't know that there is a simple solution to this problem, but I
think we need to stop over-exaggerating the issue and attributing
enwiki's action to biases or malice if we are to make any progress.