[Foundation-l] Automatic username transliteration for SUL

Thu Dec 21 10:24:04 UTC 2006

Neil Harris wrote:
> James Hare wrote:
>> On Wikipedia-l or something similar there has been discussion involving
>> English Wikipedia's policy of blocking users with usernames that do not use
>> the Latin alphabet. Reasons for opposition to this practice include
>> ethnocentricism and messing up SUL. However, a point was raised in that
>> people unfamiliar with the script will just see it as a bunch of
>> squiggly-lines. A suggested remedy was having people transliterate their
>> names depending on the wiki.
>>
>> I'm interested in combining this with a script similar to the Automatic
>> Conversion script employed on the Chinese Wikipedia, that would, combined
>> with SUL, automatically transliterate usernames contingent on the wiki they
>> are on. For example, on French Wikipedia, your username would be in Latin
>> script, whereas on the Hebrew Wikipedia your username would be in Hebrew
>> script and on Arabic Wikipedia your username would be in Arabic script.
>>
>> I know there are scripts out there that can transliterate -- in addition to
>> the aforementioned conversion script on the Chinese Wikipedia, there are
>> quite a few scripts out there that will allow you to input something and
>> have it output in a different script.
>>
>> http://vereb.free.fr/transliteration/transliterator.html has a pretty cool
>> one that allows you to type with Latin alphabet settings and it will output
>> in a different script. For example,
>> - MessedRocker becomes МесседРоцкер with the Cyrillic setting
>> - MessedRocker becomes ΜεσσεδΡοcκερ with the Greek setting
>> - MessedRocker becomes مِصِدرُطكِر with the Arabic setting.
>>
>> If something could be created for SUL that would take a username and
>> transliterate it depending on the language of the wiki, that would be great.
>> I understand there are technical issues involved, but I would like to
>> discuss it on a community level.
>>
>> --James
>>   
> 
> If we can make it as simple as that (and acknowledge that the automatic 
> transliteration will often be very, very,  bad) we could possibly make 
> this work, with the option to change your nick to something else later.
> 
> Perhaps language -> IPA -> language might be a good way of helping the m 
> x n problem for this, in which case we could use language <-> IPA tables 
> to bootstrap this.
> 
> Would this be a good idea, or would it be linguistic nonsense?
> 

My signature on en: is currently the IPA transliteration of how I
pronounce my username.

-- 
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
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