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

[George Herbert]

On 12/20/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
> The Cunctator wrote:
>
> >On 12/20/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Hello,
> >>today a user on Japanese Wikipedia whose account is in Kana (a
> >>Japanese script) came to our Admins' noticeboard to request for
> >>chaning his username. He said he would have liked to do so because he
> >>had changed his username on English Wikipedia.
> >>
> >>I repeat again the English Wikipedia community should reconsider how
> >>shameful and discriptive policy they has about users' identity and
> >>respect of cultural diversity, and how badly it affects other
> >>communities. I am very sorry to see such a request fullfiled to our
> >>request page.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >Although there are strong relationships between language and culture, I
> >believe you are off the mark.
> >
> >It is not unreasonable for the English Wikipedia to have a policy of
> >Latin-alphabet usernames.
> >
> Then it wouldn't be unreasonable for the Japanese wikipedia to have a
> policy of only Kana usernames. You bloody yanks, limeys and ozzies and
> other anglo saxon idiots are so fucking biased about everybody needs to
> speak your f*******g language and nees to understand your f*****g
> cultures it is disgusting. There are more peopel around speaking non
> english based languages then there are people speaking the lingo. Learn
> to adapt to that. I can only predict the whining of stupid Americans
> about feeling discriminated when they would be requirde to login in
> Chinese on the Chinese wikipedia or Thai on the Thai wikipedia.
>
> Why the f*** should everybody learn your pissant of a language if you
> refuse to learn others.,
>
> Waerth .... extremely pissed off
>

It is also unacceptable for dedicated vandals to show up, register an
account whose visual depiction is not at all distinguishable from the
accountname of an existing administrator or long-time editor due to the use
of similar ISO characters, and then go on a vandalism rampage which gets
blamed on the normal admin.

We had this happen a week ago with an omega character substituted for an O.

I've seen it done with 1/L and 0/o.  Someone tried to impersonate me with
one letter dropped; I'm suprised they didn't do the 1/L thing instead.

There are some very nasty, creative people out there.  If you start enabling
them to cause more trouble, you are a problem.

I'm all for multiculturalism, but this issue HAS to get looked at and
thought about.  That does not mean that en.wikipedia may not end up just
having to abandon that policy in the end, but if we do that there's going to
be an opening for vandals to impersonate us.

We might have to do something like go from (username) to (username, ID#)
tuples to ultimately get around this, which is terribly ugly.


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