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

[Rory Stolzenberg]

On 12/20/06, Rory Stolzenberg <rory096 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/20/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> >
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> > Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > > What Aphaia means is that people have asked to change their Japanese
> > > name because of the insistence of the English project that people have
> > a
> > > Latin name. With the long hoped for single login this policy of the
> > > English Wikipedia HAS to go the way of the dinosaur. It is unfortunate
> > > that this policy is still active.
> >
> > No such policy exists, far as I know. If some vigilante group is trying
> > to enforce it, they need to be told that Wikipedia and Wikimedia have no
> > such restriction.
> >
> > Of course people are free to change their usernames if they wish.
> >
> > - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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>
> I also thought that the blocks were just done by admins and weren't
> actually in policy, but it turns out that [[en:WP:USERNAME]] does indeed say
> " *Names with non-Latin <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet>characters:
> * Unfortunately, most of your fellow editors will be unable to read a name
> written in Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or other scripts. Many of
> them will also be additionally burdened, as such names may be displayed for
> them only as question marks ("??? ??"), squares ("□□□ □□"), replacement
> characters ("??? ??") or worse, nonsense or mojibake<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake>("Ã!%ôs*"). If your name is usually written in a non-Latin script, please
> consider transliterating <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration> it
> to avoid confusion, and allow easier access to your talk page by typing your
> name in the search field or URL bar." under the "Inappropriate usernames"
> section. I'm about to go through the history to see when it was added.
>


Surprisingly, I actually did what I said I would do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AUsername&diff=43879592&oldid=43878407is
the diff. There's nothing in the talk page archive at or before the
addition, though there is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Username/archive01#Usernames .
However, admins probably blocked for this well before the addition, and
there's all that stuff about policy reflecting current practice and whatnot.