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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Let me inform you that we support projects in languages for which all 
the glyphs needed to create UNICODE compatible fonts do not exist. For 
many languages you can indeed turn on the support to make the characters 
available. This does however not mean that you have learned to 
distinguish these characters. What is relevant and reasonable is that we 
disallow mixing characters that are not part of the characters used in 
one language.
Thanks,
    GerardM

Stephen Bain schreef:
> On 12/20/06, Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> I can understand the rationale for this policy, but it _is_
>> ethnocentric, and it counters the problem from the wrong side, if you
>> know what I mean. Instead of trying to fix the problem, they try to
>> remove it.
>>     
>
> I think it's horribly rude for the other admins on en: to be blocking
> people for using non-Latin characters in their username. A more polite
> approach would be to ask them to add a transliteration to their
> signature, that would satisfy many people.
>
> The problem is fairly simple, people who speak only English don't
> bother installing language support on their computers, even though
> (AFAIK) it is included with all operating systems these days. All they
> need to do is get their installation CD out and turn it on.