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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 12/22/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

The first number is in error. Almost everywhere usersnames are handled
in mediawiki, space characters are converted into underscores, but
this is not true in the user table. My failure to account for this
caused me to count usernames that contain spaces as once with
non-ascii characters.  I did not spot check the results because I used
the same matching expression that I used for the block log, and I had
carefully checked those results.

The correct total count for usernames with non-ascii characters is
7,678.  I apologise for this substantial error.  Although I don't
believe this in any way invalidates the claim that I made that enwiki
is not automatically blocking such names.