[Foundation-l] Sigh, problems with non-Latin usernames again

[Anders Wegge Jakobsen]

Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> writes:

> --- Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge at wegge.dk> wrote:

>>  The problem is that "speakers of the english language" seem to
>> gravitate towards the lowest common denominator. We are writing an
>> encyclopedia for Petes sake! Editors are supposedly in command of a
>> skillset that's beyond burger flipping 101. If not, they have no
>> place writing an encyclopedia anyway.
 
> Yes...but what skillset are you thinking editors should have? No
> editor has the ability to be able to easily recognise and
> distinguish every script a Wikipedia editor might express a username
> in.

 "squiggle Toad Worm Bird" Yup, I recognise the visuals.

> A lot Wikipedia thinking rests on associating knowledge of users
> with their name: "ah, User:Foobar, I remember working with him on an
> article last year; I don't need to check the minor edit he just
> made" etc. Such recognition -- the basis of community, in fact -- is
> made much more difficult if "User:Foobar" was "User:?????" or
> User:<something_that_looks_remarkably_like_a_squiggle_to_the_uninitiated>.

 Learn to discern between squiggles then. If you claim that the
average editor is able to remeber User:JoeBloggs from way back, then
any claim of not beeing able to discern between squiggles revolve
around being unable (or unwilling) to install the proper font needed
to make sense out of User:Æøå. 

>>  Will the next demand be that interwiki targets must only be named
>> with latin-1 characters?
 
> Come on, that's a one of them strawman thingybobs: nobody's
> demanding this, and there's no reason to thing anyone would. There
> are few Wikipedia interactions that are affected by the ability to
> read non-Latin-1 interwiki targets.

 You are free to call that argument a strawman, as long as you accept
that your basic premise (that latin-1 is the bee's knees) are a
strawman as well.

-- 
// Wegge
<http://geowiki.wegge.dk/wiki/Forside> - Alt om geocaching
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