[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:
[snip]
> and make a local query? Sincerely, I don't understand any effort to
> defend this stupid policy from English Wikipedia, like I don't understand
> the recent xenophobic on the latest steward elections. This policy, the
> votes like "generic vote against Anglo-American focus of all wiki-projects"
> and some small points are to me the same subject: bias
>
> I don't have time to talk in biased subjects, my free time is devoted to
> develop libre content.

Since you mention the policy, I wonder if you've read it....
The original formulation of the policy was:

"'''Avoid non-[[Latin alphabet|Latin]] characters'''. 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 be
additionally burdened, as such names will be displayed for them only
as question marks ("??? ??") or squares ("□□□ □□"). If your name is
usually written in a non-Latin script, please consider transliterating
it to avoid confusion, and allow easier access to your talk page by
typing your name in the search field or URL bar. However, you may use
other alphabets as alternate link text in your [[WP:SIG|signature]]."

Today it includes a little less explanation and the word avoid was removed.

"Names with non-Latin 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 ("Ã!%ôs*"). If your name is
usually written in a non-Latin script, please consider transliterating
it to avoid confusion, and allow easier access to your talk page by
typing your name in the search field or URL bar."


If you really can read that as bias.. then I'm afraid we're just going
to have to disagree.

I guess I'll just have to be branded a "bigot against people named
mathematical symbols". ;)