On 12/20/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)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(a)gmail.com