[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects other communities

[Kusma]

On 12/20/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> This has nothing to do with ethnocentric-ness it's language-centric-ness.
> The English Wikipedia is written in English so usernames should be in a
> Latin font so English administrators know who a user is and don't have to
> wriggle in all sorts of odd angles to refer to such a user or to block them
> for example. Also, Japanese characters are sufficiently confusing for
> Westerners to fall under the "Don't make a username that's too similar to
> another user's" rule.
>
Convenience for enwiki administrators is no excuse for being rude to
contributors from other language Wikipedias.

> And then there's people whose system doesn't support Japanese/Chinese/Korean
> font.
> It's simply impossible for the English Wikipedia to handle this from a
> practical standpoint.
>

We could stop blocking users who haven't done anything wrong, and only
annoy them when their behaviour becomes a real instead of a potential
problem (you know, assume good faith). If a user with a username in
Telugu does nothing but add Telugu interwikilinks, why should I care
that I can't read their username? Once the weird-looking username is
used for vandalism, we can assume bad faith and block it. In most
other cases, an ASCII sig and (if the user agrees) a username change
should be enough if the user does more than add interwikilinks.

It is also not nice of us to block people who might not be speaking
English with a block message that they can't understand. If we block
people who are here only to make interwikilinks because they want to
use the same username as on their home wiki, we should at least
provide a block message in their native language.

Kusma