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

[George Herbert]

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.
>
> 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



One major issue here has been impersonations using non-latin characters.

This already happens with "1" for "l", and "0" for "o" or "O".  It *is* a
problem; we've had numerous cases of impersonators, some of whom have been
very subtle vandals.  Adding more visually indistinct characters to the
username characters list is potentially real trouble.

I don't know that anyone really thought this all the way through, the
implications for enwiki policies combined with the future single-signon for
all wikipedia sites... 8-(


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com