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

[Andrew Gray]

On 30/01/07, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
> Single User Login is enabled on Wikia... hum... I think that this policy
> from English Wikipedia is one of the reasons for this don't get enabled so
> quick on Wikimedia

There is no requirement, of course, that SUL means "have the username
display the same way everywhere". Even if any given username only has
one person behind it, it doesn't stop us declaring the "real user" to
be an arbitrary database code and hanging a dozen visible usernames
off that... ;-)

[I would utterly love a hack which allowed you to ask for any
non-Latin username - or perhaps any username - to have an arbitrary
User-ID appended to the back of it - "foobar" or "foobar (123456)" -
whenever it showed up in logs. Those who find it useful can flip a
switch and on it comes; those who don't, well, it'd be off by default)

But looking back over the thread, there is an awful lot of stupidity
and - not to put too fine a point on it - desire To Make A Fuss being
demonstrated here. Tthe proposal is not some grand racist conspiracy
to prevent contributions from non-Anglophones. The proposal is to ask
them, *when they sign things on discussion pages*, to use a
transliteration. It's a proposal to solve a problem that doesn't yet
significantly exist - we'd do much better to BAN PEOPLE WITH GIANT
COLOURED FOUR-LINE SIGNATURES, if you ask me - so not a desperately
helpful one, but it really doesn't deserve this much screaming. We
have bigger problems to worry about.

Please, people, cool off a little...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk