[Foundation-l] Sigh, problems with non-Latin usernames again

[Gerard Meijssen]

Matt R schreef:
> --- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:
>   
>> Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>> What I am saying is that editors who enter
>>     
>>> into non-trivial interactions on the English Wikipedia should be
>>> obliged to have a handle that can be grokked by speakers of the
>>> English language.
>>>       
>>  The problem is that "speakers of the english language" seem to
>> gravitate towards the lowest common denominator. We are writing an
>> encyclopedia for Petes sake! Editors are supposedly in command of a
>> skillset that's beyond burger flipping 101. If not, they have no place
>> writing an encyclopedia anyway.
>>     
>
> Yes...but what skillset are you thinking editors should have? No editor has the
> ability to be able to easily recognise and distinguish every script a Wikipedia
> editor might express a username in. 
>
> A lot Wikipedia thinking rests on associating knowledge of users with their
> name: "ah, User:Foobar, I remember working with him on an article last year; I
> don't need to check the minor edit he just made" etc. Such recognition -- the
> basis of community, in fact -- is made much more difficult if "User:Foobar" was
> "User:?????" or
> User:<something_that_looks_remarkably_like_a_squiggle_to_the_uninitiated>.
>   
Do you really believe that people remember who they worked with last 
year on an article? Given the sheer multitude of people only a tiny core 
of people are known. They are the "power users" of a project.
>   
>>  Will the next demand be that interwiki targets must only be named
>> with latin-1 characters?
>>     
>
> Come on, that's a one of them strawman thingybobs: nobody's demanding this, and
> there's no reason to thing anyone would. There are few Wikipedia interactions
> that are affected by the ability to read non-Latin-1 interwiki targets. 
>   
Come on, so you can call them thingybobs, the right name for this 
attitude is discrimination. People are demanding things; they want to be 
known by their own user ID. The one that they use on their own project 
as well. You on the other hand deny them that they can. You may recall 
that this is a flare up of something that was discussed last month. You 
may want to read back what an impact it had on the Japanese Wikipedia. 
You may want to read how much one of our most valuable Wikimedians was 
distressed by this attitude.
Thanks,
    Gerard