[WikiEN-l] Re: Discussion on English Wikipedia in languages other than English

Tue Jun 14 07:37:05 UTC 2005

Angela,

I thought about precisely the situation you describe when I composed my 
original message. Obviously someone who is trying to communicate with 
users on a wiki that's in a language they don't command should be 
welcomed in trying to communicate in whatever way they can.

My concern is with users who have demonstrated elsewhere that they have 
a perfectly adequate command of written English but who deliberately 
choose to not use English on certain article talk and Wikipedia project 
pages.

Clearly, legislating against it is not popular here. But I think we 
should discourage such behavior because it's clearly intentionally 
exclusionary. There is a point at which good faith can longer be assumed.

For example, let's say a pair of editors repeatedly revert a change I 
make to an article, then post some messages in a foreign language to the 
article talk pages as well as to their own user talk pages and the "Xyz 
Wikipedians' notice board". Some of these messages clearly contain my 
user name.

How should one respond to something like that? By politely asking that 
they translate their messages to English?

I'll start by posting machine translations and requesting that they be 
cleaned up enough to be intelligible. I doubt I'll get very far, though, 
because these editors are already on a campaign to defame me elsewhere 
on Wikipedia.

Here's to assuming good faith! :-)

- David

Angela wrote:
> On 13/06/05, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
> 
>>I have noted an increase of discussion on English Wikipedia in languages
>>other than English lately. For now, I'll forgo naming languages and
>>listing particular offenders here.
>>
>>Do we have a policy on this? Should we?
> 
> 
> I don't see a need for a policy. It's a wiki, so anyone is free to add
> translations, or even replace the original text with English.
> 
> I regularly leave messages on talk pages and user talk pages in
> English on the non-English wikis
> (<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_MediaWiki:Extlink_sample> or
> <http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:PiaCarrot#Administrator> for
> example). Should I be banned from communicated in those places? Or
> should people assume good faith rather than assuming distrust and
> simply ask me to find someone to translate it if they feel a need to
> read those messages?
> 
> Angela.