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

[The Cunctator]

On 12/20/06, Kusma <kusma.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.


In part because usernames that use non-Latin character sets are completely
indistinguishable to someone without those fonts loaded.

Hard to figure out if ??????? is the good user and ??????? is the bad one.


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.


That would be nice.