from_name: Brad Patrick

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Wikimedia Foundation's help to the
 projects

body:
I have put a disclaimer on the page pending development and a larger
internal discussion about what is or is not a proper position to be
taken by the Foundation.

Thanks for kicking this off!

-Brad

Yann Forget wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Brad Patrick a ?crit :
>
>> "You took the words right out of my mouth."  Exactly.  For those who
>> want answers,
>> (a) it's complicated
>> (b) the answer is "it depends"
>> (c) there is no "right" answer
>> (d) if there is a "right" answer, it can be challenged
>> (e) no, we aren't going to represent you to fight about it.
>>
>
> Erik Moeller a ?crit :
>
>> On 12/14/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I don't believe you understand how useful it would be
>>> to just have some one say "That particular case is
>>> unknown.  The most similar case to this is Foobar."
>>> Even if there were a table of questions that people
>>> have asked in the past with yes/no/unknown and no
>>> futher advice would be extremely helpful.  I think it
>>> a false expectation of yours that we are expecting
>>> clearcut answers.  Really we have been mucking through
>>> copyright questions as best we can for some time; we
>>> are all well aware there are often not answers only
>>> arguments.  Just being able to eliminate some
>>> arguments as invalid would be very helpful.
>>>
>> Aside from the potential issues with the WMF "officially" giving such
>> advice to the communities, Brad (our GC and ED) simply doesn't have
>> the time to do this.
>>
>
> Obviously I didn't mean that Brad or any professional lawyer paid by the
> Foundation has to write all this. The information has to be put down by
> the wiki editors as usual, but I think that the coordination is to be
> done at the Foundation level, not for each wiki. Then maybe a
> professional lawyer in behalf of the Foundation can give a general
> agreement about the policy, or just say "this is wrong and has to be
> written again". I am not even sure if this last step is necessary or
> possible.
>
>
>> Let's brainstorm about how we can get juriwiki-l
>> going, i.e. a functioning, community-driven group of advisors with
>> demonstrable legal expertise.
>>
>> At the moment juriwiki-l is configured so that postings from the
>> outside are moderated and replied to by a group of insiders. Is there
>> any real issue, from a legal point of view, with making it a public
>> mailing list? This is perhaps something Brad can answer.
>>
>
> For what I need, I don't think a mailing list is the answer.
> I think that the information should be on the wiki (probably Meta or
> Commons).
>
> There is already a lot of information about legal issues on different
> wikis [1], so I cannot really buy the idea that legal matters cannot
> generally be written down somewhere. Simply what is already there is not
> enough, and a bit more detailed information is needed.
>
> Ray Saintonge a ?crit :
>
>> It may not always be easy to establish when the picture was taken, or
>> who took it.
>>
>
> All the above implies that this information is known, obviously. The
> case when this information is unknown will need rules in itself, and it
> may not be the least interesting. Which rules are to be applied when the
> author is not known? when the date is not known? when the place is not
> known? etc.
>
> So I started a stub here. Please help to complete it.
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_rules
>
> [1] See for example http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_tags
>
> Regards,
>
> Yann
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox


list: foundation-l

from_name: Andre Engels

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

body:
2006/12/20, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>:

> No such policy exists, far as I know. If some vigilante group is trying
> to enforce it, they need to be told that Wikipedia and Wikimedia have no
> such restriction.

The policy  does exist, and the vigilante group that tries to enforce this
is quite succesful in doing so, because they have admin rights on
en:wikipedia, so people who do not keep to it get blocked from English
Wikipedia.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


from_name: George Herbert

body:
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


list: wikien-l

from_name: Kusma

subject: [WikiEN-l] Linksearch

body:
On 12/20/06, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not aware of any current black magic solutions to sort by namespace,
> unfortunately, although it seems like Javascript would proooobably be up to
> the task. I'd also be intrigued if we could sort [[Special:Whatlinkshere]]
> results by namespace.
>
Yes, please. The To do sections some WikiProject templates have and
similar templates like {{Opentask}} result in huge amounts of
irrelevant links appearing in Whatlinkshere. For example, it is
practically impossible to find out what articles link to a requested
article listed on a WikiProject template, since the irrelevant links
completely overwhelm the relevant ones. Similarly, it is impossible to
advertise a [[WP:DPL]] disambiguation page that needs its incoming
links fixed on an opentask template, as this produces huge amounts of
irrelevant links. If we could filter the links by namespace, all these
problems would go away.

Kusma


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Foundation-l] Oversight rights

body:
On 20/12/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> The effect of an inappropriate release of checkuser data is an
> irreparable loss of privacy. I wouldn't go so far as saying that a
> carelessly performed checkuser could be life threatening, since if
> your life is on the line over any websites ability to protect your
> privacy thats your mistake.. but it is clear that often the result of
> a mistake made with checkuser data can not simply be undone.
> As such I don't think we should get in the practice of considering
> oversight a more sensitive privilege than checkuser.

The way we do it on en:wp is that the arbitration committee says who
gets either, and those with checkuser and oversight tend to be
arbitrators and ex-arbitrators.

That is: what Greg points out is true, but in practice if someone's
considered sufficiently trustworthy then they're likely to have either
job land on them.

(We tend not to have a lot of crossover between the
AC/checkuser/oversighter pool and the bureaucrat pool; I think only
Raul654 is both on en:wp.)

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Oversight rights


from_name: Birgitte SB

body:
en.WP is not the primary Wikipedia for many wikimedia
editors.  These usernames *are* in the primary
character set of the users home wiki.  I think it is
perfectly reasonable to expect to not be blocked just
because Wikimedia adopts SUL.  Bascially what this
boils down to is someone who today edits as an IP
without harrassment will be blocked after SUL as soon
as an en.WP admin spots them on RC.  This will happen
without the editor doing anything differently on their
end.

There is strong support for SUL throughout all
communtities, but I cannot support going live with it
if large chunks of the wikimedia community will be
locally blocked without warning on any particular
wiki.  If en.WP does not wish to adjust thier policies
to this mew development perhaps en.WP can be left out
of SUL.  Is it possible for en.WP to keep their own
user database while all other wikis use a shared
database?

Birgitte SB

--- The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

> Um. I think a policy of expecting people to have
> usernames readable in the
> primary character set of the Wikipedia is perfectly
> reasonable, whatever the
> language, and nothing to flip out about.
>
> Maybe you should reconsider your outrage.
>
> 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject:
[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Fwd: English Wikipedia ethnocentric
	policy affects other communities

body:
[adding foundation-l back to cc]

On 20/12/06, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Andrey wrote:

> > We talk about the English-language Wikipedia here, no? Other Wikimedia
> > projects allow usernames in non-Latin scripts, as best I know. For instance,
> > in Russian wikipedia, you may get a username in Cyrillic. Most complaints
> > are from those editors who have a non-Latin username in their national
> > wikipedia and fail to see why they can't keep it in English wikipedia. Best,

> Single User Login (SUL) _is_ coming soon. This means that someone with a
> login on the Russian Wikipedia will be able to have the same username on
> the English Wikipedia (just as an example).
> The question is, are we ready for this?

Yeah. I should point out that I do think blocking non-Latin character
sets is probably a bad thing, and the only reason it's now done on en:
is one way of dealing with bot-vandals. This problem will need
addressing sooner rather than later.

Are any of the vandal fighters reading this?

- d.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia ethnocentric
	policy affects other communities


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

body:
On 12/20/06, Andrey <yaroslavl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I find this complaint ill-advised. This is an English-language project;
>

No.

Wikipedia is a multilingual project. You need to take hindsight and consider
users not as accounts, but as people who edit on different Wikimedia
projects and in different languages. This is precisely the philosophy that's
behind SUL.

--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.


body:
On 12/20/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at 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


from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] Removal of Banning Notices/Cherokee Wikipedia

body:
Mr. Wales has removed the ban notices from the English Wikipedia
pertaining to me.  Based upon past issues with editing there, I have
given Mr. Wales my promise to avoid the English Wikipedia entirely since
my editing style has not been productive or worked out well with others
on the English Wikipedia due to distant past attempts to have my
article, Jeffrey Vernon Merkey, removed from Wikipedia entirely.  I have
gotten very confortable with the fine manner in which Mr. Wales and the
Foundation have handled such a sensitive topic and this controversial
article about me, and it's simply better for me to stay away from the
English Wikipedia since I AM CONTROVERSIAL and MY ARTICLE IS
CONTROVERSIAL.  It's just better to not risk the temptation that all of
us seem to experience when articles are written about us on Wikipedia.
Its better to stay away entirely to allow the processes of Wikipedia to
function the way they were intended.  My presence on the English
Wikipedia could only exacerbate this old situation surrounding the
article.  So I voluntarily choose to avoid the English Wikipedia for
these reasons.    If and when I become non-notable enough to not have an
article on Wikipedia, I will revisit the situation with Mr. Wales and
the Foundation pertaining to the English Wikipedia.  For the immediate
future and the present, ni-go-di-s-ge-s-di (that's just the way it is).

However, I have and continue to edit on the Cherokee Wikipedia and have
a large body of content in Creek, Chicksaw, Dine, Cherokee, and other
Native Languages I plan to contribute back to the Native American
Wikipedia's over time.    There are no bans on my contributions in these
areas.  Although Mr. Wales has removed the ban, I wish to avoid any
future problems editing the English Wikipedia and make the best effort I
can to heal old wounds and put the past where it belongs -- in the past.

I also would like to start posting featured articles on the Cherokee
Wikipedia, and in time, the other Native American Wikipedia sites as
well. I formally request consideration by the Wikipedia Community for
admin status on the Cherokee Wikipedia to fully Cherokee Language enable
it and start posting articles in our language and really get the site up
to the same level as the English Wikipedia.  Since I have voluntarily
elected to avoid the English Wikipedia site, and since I am the only
active Native Speaking editor on the Cherokee Wikipedia, asking for
admin status there would only result in me voting for myself, since
there is no one else.

I therefore submit this request via the foundation mailing list for
consideration.  Your consideration would be appreciated.

Sincerely,

Jeff V. Merkey


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
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.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: JePe

subject: [Wikitech-l] SVN: [18372] trunk/phase3 Special:Booksources

body:
Also the interwikis aren't displayed anymore on the resulting page. On
nl.wikipedia and some other wikis we have interwikis including the MAGICNUMBER,
so on Special:Booksources they are displayed as normal interwiki links to the
page in another language with the same ISBN.

The source-page with the interwikis:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Boekinformatie

Hans (JePe)


from_name: Abigail Brady

body:
On 12/20/06, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes. Thanks for that important clarification.

Does anyone know how SUL will work with the "new users" log?
Currently, we monitor the new users log, and then sometimes block
obvious sleeper accounts.  Do we get a single new users log for all
wikimedia projects?  Or will there be an "activate my SUL account on
this project" button that will put an entry in a site-specific new
users log, or what?

--
Abi


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia ethnocentric
 policy affects other communities

body:
Matt R wrote:
> Perhaps the software can be set-up so that users with non-Latin-script names
> can specify a transliteration of their username for en?
>
The transliteration will be useful for more than en: - ru: editors are
also more likely to recognize Latin transliterations of ja: .

And before anybody screams about "Latin charset imperialism", note that
all the nations of the world have long agreed to include Latin versions
of their names on their postage stamps, in addition to any preferred
native scripts (UK gets to omit name entirely, as the first to issue
stamps), for the benefit of postal clerks who are not expert linguists.

Stan


from_name: Luna

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/20/06, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
>
> Make the whole of template space editable by admins only, and loosen the
> grip on adminship.  Templates are probably an area which should be kept
> to trusted users, and admins are our trusted users.  Might make the
> community face up to rewiring RFA.

If the goal is to make adminship "no big deal," I'm not sure if
adminprotecting an entire namespace will accomplish that. :E Although the
template vandalism has exasperated and frustrated me more than anything else
in recent memory, I don't think that's the way to go. Granted, there was a
proposal to sprotect them all...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Sprotect_all_templates.3F

Sprotecting every widely used template, I'll support. It might be preferred
that we think about making an access level between autoconfirmed and sysop
-- people who get access to an intermediate protection level and have the
ability to admin rollback. That could be operated by a simple requests page
(like AWB, but probably even less stringent), or just after some particular
amount of time (two weeks, or a month, maybe?).

Giving admin rollback to a wider number of users would save a lot of time,
effort, and bandwidth for RC patrol, at least. An intermediate protection
level would let us clamp down on some of these templates, without locking
the vast majority of users out.

Just food for thought, I guess. Butcher and propose as you please.

-Luna


from_name: Dave Grogan

subject: [Wikitech-l] track changes / svn blame view

body:
I have made further progress on this extension.

Check out these screenshots, I've got a "rendered" track changes view
working in addition to the raw view.  You can also look at these things
side-by-side, similar to the current diff view.

original page (notice the 2 track changes tabs)
http://people.virginia.edu/~kjl3d/wiki/page.png

raw track changes view
http://people.virginia.edu/~kjl3d/wiki/raw.png

raw side by side track changes view
http://people.virginia.edu/~kjl3d/wiki/rawSidebySide.png

rendered view
http://people.virginia.edu/~kjl3d/wiki/rendered.png

rendered side-by-side view
http://people.virginia.edu/~kjl3d/wiki/renderedSideBySide.png

Anyway, the discussion about changes to the ArticleSaveComplete hook
seems to have been trailed off.  Mark Clements had some ideas on how I
could get the same functionality without changing the hook but they
didn't pan out like we'd hoped.  The crux of the problem is that the
newly-added revision isn't passed to the hook (see thread "can I add
parameters to hooks used by two extensions (spellchecker and svn
blame-like view").

I'd like to get this extension checked into subversion so that others
can use it.  I'd also like to amend the ArticleSaveComplete hook in
whatever way seems most fit so that this extension can work.  Who do I
talk to about getting commit access so that I can commit this extension,
continue development on it, and make any agreed-upon changes to the hook?

Thanks,
Dave


from_name: Thomas Dalton

subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR

body:
> > I think it is implicit that "The sky is blue [1]" means "Source 1 says
> > the sky is blue". We don't need to go through and put "So-and-so says"
> > at the beginning of every sentence in the encyclopaedia.
>
> Which is different from "Everyone agrees the sky is blue [1][2][3][4][5][6]".

Very much so.


from_name: rfrangi at libero.it

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

body:
Stephen Bain wrote:
>
> I think it's horribly rude for the other admins on en: to be blocking
> people for using non-Latin characters in their username. A more polite
> approach would be to ask them to add a transliteration to their
> signature, that would satisfy many people.
>
> The problem is fairly simple, people who speak only English don't
> bother installing language support on their computers, even though
> (AFAIK) it is included with all operating systems these days. All they
> need to do is get their installation CD out and turn it on.
>

Generalizing the problem; if your username is written with a set of characters that is different from the one used on the wiki, then add in your signature a translitteration using the character set of that wiki.

Roberto (Snowdog)

------------------------------------------------------
Passa a Infostrada. ADSL e Telefono senza limiti e senza canone Telecom
http://click.libero.it/infostrada20dic06


from_name: Anthere

body:
Please, have a look at http://www.wikipedia.org

There is a whole world aside from the english project. The japanese
wikipedia has over 300 000 articles. We are working in over 200
languages. English is only part of it.

But let me explain why it is an issue.

In a very short time (hopefully, ahum), a new feature will be unable on
the project. The Single Login.

The Single Login will make it so, that one person is registed on all
projects and all languages, with only one account. Right now, the
account system is such that one person has one account for each project
and for each language as it is now.

So, right now, if an english user, called in real life William
Sommerfield, has created an account [[user:William]] on the english
wikipedia, he may be [[user:WilliamSommerfield]] on the english
wikibooks, and [[user:WilliamS]] on the french wikinews.

And a bilingual japanese english editor may be under a japanese user
name on the japanese wikipedia, and under an english user name on the
english wikipedia (thus respecting your rule of avoiding non-latin
caracters).

BUT, soon, this will not be possible any more. All users will have only
ONE account.

So, if a japanese person has an account on the japanese wikipedia, with
non latin caracters, he should not have to be forced to change his
global name to unnatural caracters, just to be able to do a couple of
edits under his user name on the english wikipedia.

Similarly, an english editor should be able to edit under his latin name
on the japanese wikipedia.

Do you understand the problem now ?

Now, it is reported that english editors do not like seeing non latin
caracters names, because it is difficult to distinguish and may be
confused with bot gibberish.

As reported on the Foundation list, Wikigod? Brion has already addressed
this; it is no longer possible to create usernames which uses several
scripts. So you cannot mix Latin and Cyrillic characters, or Latin and
Greek, or even Greek and Cyrillic (or Arabic or Devanagari or ?), so
that is no longer an issue.

There is still the issue of "recognising" names, and a guideline for
that matter might be helpful. But it is not okay to force people to
change their user name just to fit one wikipedia rules. And it certainly
is not okay to block people from non english cultures because they
refuse to comply to change their name for a westernish one. The main
result it would have would be to prevent most people from asian
countries to participate to the english wikipedia. Is that suitable ?
I'd say it is not.

So, rather than saying the complaint is ill-advise, I rather recommand
that we work together trying to set up a compromise which will be
acceptable by all parties. Saying "your name is not valid because I can
not read your language, so you can't edit Wikipedia" is not what I would
call a compromise.

Anthere

Andrey wrote:
> I find this complaint ill-advised. This is an English-language project;
> English language uses Latin script; ergo, non-Latin usernames are not
> acceptable. Naturally, I want to know the usernames of people I speak to,
> but I would not know how to refer to an editor who spells his name in
> Japanese or Armenian, since I can't read either Japanese or Armenian. There
> is nothing ethnocentric about that. Best, Andrey
>
> On 12/20/06, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Forwarding from foundation-l, after a brief discussion between myself and
>>the original poster. See more at:
>>http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-December/thread.html
>>
>>"English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects other communities" --
>>specifically, our username policy, and the practice of blocking non-Latin
>>usernames on sight.
>>
>>Seems a number of multi-wiki users have felt pushed away or chagrined by
>>this policy. Single-login seems like it might render the whole thing a
>>moot
>>point -- are we ready for the implications of that? Or does anything need
>>to
>>be done? Do we know how single-login will affect each wiki's ability to
>>set
>>and enforce a username policy, and if so, should changes to the policy
>>result?
>>
>>Myself, I'm not sure of the answers to any of these questions, just yet.
>>But
>>it seems like we may as well discuss it.
>>
>>Apologies if I just happened to miss a prior thread -- if it's already
>>happened, I don't remember seeing it.
>>
>>-Luna
>>
>>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>From: Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com>
>>Date: Dec 20, 2006 12:07 AM
>>Subject: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects
>>other
>>communities
>>To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>>
>>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.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>--
>>KIZU Naoko
>>Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
>>* Nessuna poesia prima di noi *
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>_______________________________________________
>>WikiEN-l mailing list
>>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>>To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Neil Harris

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

body:
Stephen Bain wrote:
> On 12/20/06, Jon Harald S?by <jhsoby at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I can understand the rationale for this policy, but it _is_
>> ethnocentric, and it counters the problem from the wrong side, if you
>> know what I mean. Instead of trying to fix the problem, they try to
>> remove it.
>>
>
> I think it's horribly rude for the other admins on en: to be blocking
> people for using non-Latin characters in their username. A more polite
> approach would be to ask them to add a transliteration to their
> signature, that would satisfy many people.
>
> The problem is fairly simple, people who speak only English don't
> bother installing language support on their computers, even though
> (AFAIK) it is included with all operating systems these days. All they
> need to do is get their installation CD out and turn it on.
>
>

The major problem is that, to most Latin-script-only contributors cannot
accurately memorize or distinguish many non-Latin names. For example,
the average Western user cannot clearly visualize -- or communicate to
others -- the differences between (chosen at random) ?, ?, and ?, all
of which look remarkably similar to them, even though they are
immediately and obviously distinguishable by any Chinese reader.

Since Wikipedia needs names to be human-recognizable in order to
function, this needs fixing, and since it is impractical to educate all
Wikipedia contributors to literacy in all major world script systems,
transliteration -- or some other disambiguation system -- will be
necessary in order to make names distinct to human readers who are
unfamiliar with other writing systems.

Possibility 1:

For example, a user with the Japanese name ? could add a Latin-script
transliteration ("Takeshi"), and appear on Latin-script wikis as

[[User:? (Takeshi)]]

or possibly:

[[User:Takeshi (?)]]

Of course, to avoid any appearance of linguistic imperialism, the same
facility should be available for users with Latin-script names to add
transliterations in other scripts.

Possibility 2:

All usernames could have their internal Wikipedia IDs appended, perhaps
in the form of hex numbers, allowing them to be uniquely identified,
regardless of the culture of the readers, providing only that they can
read hex digits. For example:

? (x610d49)

Ideally, a unique fixed-length hash of the internal ID number would be
used, to avoid the emergence of a "pecking order" based on one user
having an earlier-issued ID number than another.

-- Neil


body:
On 12/20/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> George Herbert schreef:
> > 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.
> Hoi,
> With Single User Login, this scheme will not be possible anymore .. a
> user is THAT user and no one else can impersonate him by having the same
> user. So the basic argument here is incorrect. It will no longer be
> possible and, this whole ugly affair demonstrates admirably that we need
> SUL as soon as possible ..
>
> PLEASE BRION .. get this over and done with.
>
> Thanks,
>     Gerard
>

This doesn't address my point.

There is very little difference between "Georgewilliamherbert" and
"Georgewi11iamherbert" in most character displays.  This is bad enough, but
we have people aware of it and looking for it.  There are non-latin
characters which are visually indistinguishable from "o" and others
available as well.  We *HAVE SEEN* an impersonation of an experienced editor
where the impersonator used a greek omega that rendered as an "o" character.

Refusing to pay attention to this problem rises to the level of a
show-stopper for en, in my opinion.  We really really should not stomp all
over one of the en defensive mechanisms against vandals without at least
looking at the issues raised and alerting people to the impact.

The ultimate answer may well be that en.wikipedia has to remove that policy
and deal with it.  Has anyone posted any notice of this to wikien-l or the
Village Pump on en, or do you think it's reasonable and fair to just do it
without proper and fair notice and time to allow en to talk about it and
figure out how to handle it?

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

body:
> 3. Sarah points out the following text from WP:NOR :
>       "anyone--without specialist knowledge--who reads the
>       primary source should be able to verify that the Wikipedia
>       passage agrees with the primary source. Any interpretation
>       of primary source material requires a secondary source."
>   That seems to be broken.  Examples of specialist knowledge
>   which might be required are the ability to read a foreign
>   language and the ability to understand mathematical notation.
>
>   Someone who can read music should be able to report from
>   a musical score that it is in E-flat, even though that requires
>   specialist knowledge.  What the policy *should* require
>   (somehow) is that anyone who can read music will agree that
>   the score is in E-flat.  The fundamental skills of the field
>   should be assumed, and the policy should reflect that, imo.

I agree, that needs to be changed, but I'm not sure what to. We need
to define what kind of specialist knowledge is ok, and what isn't. For
example, is being able to speak Latin acceptable specialist knowledge
to use, basically meaning Latin speakers can translate the primary
source in the article? (It's definately preferable to cite a
translation, but if there isn't one, it may or may not be ok for a
Wikipedian to translate it, we need to decide.)

> 4. Sarah wrote: "We use writers as sources, not databases and
>   libraries."  Nobody suggested libraries.  I don't see that
>   databases are excluded by any existing policy, provided that
>   the process of extraction of the information from the database
>   is verifiable.
>
>   Suppose I have a book about a serial killer, which lists all the
>   victims one by one.  I think it is perfectly ok to write "all the
>   victims were women" after looking up each case in the book.
>   It comes under "research that consists of collecting and
>   organizing information from existing primary and/or secondary
>   sources is, of course, strongly encouraged."(WP:NOR)  I can't
>   see how that is different *in principle* from reporting that all
>   the articles on a particular subject in a particular database
>   give the same story about something, provided that that
>   observation is one that anyone can verify.  Of course this
>   criterion might not always be satisfied, but that shouldn't
>   eliminate the cases where it is.

The key point here is that your source for the statement that all the
papers say the same thing isn't just the papers, it's the database. If
there is a way to reliable cite the database, rather than just the
sources it contains (a link to the search results page, perhaps), then
it might be ok, but just citing the papers definately isn't.


body:
On 12/20/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 12/20/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > George Herbert schreef:
> > > 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.
> > Hoi,
> > With Single User Login, this scheme will not be possible anymore .. a
> > user is THAT user and no one else can impersonate him by having the same
> >
> > user. So the basic argument here is incorrect. It will no longer be
> > possible and, this whole ugly affair demonstrates admirably that we need
> > SUL as soon as possible ..
> >
> > PLEASE BRION .. get this over and done with.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >     Gerard
> >
>
> This doesn't address my point.
>
> There is very little difference between "Georgewilliamherbert" and
> "Georgewi11iamherbert" in most character displays.  This is bad enough, but
> we have people aware of it and looking for it.  There are non-latin
> characters which are visually indistinguishable from "o" and others
> available as well.  We *HAVE SEEN* an impersonation of an experienced editor
> where the impersonator used a greek omega that rendered as an "o" character.
>
>
> Refusing to pay attention to this problem rises to the level of a
> show-stopper for en, in my opinion.  We really really should not stomp all
> over one of the en defensive mechanisms against vandals without at least
> looking at the issues raised and alerting people to the impact.
>
> The ultimate answer may well be that en.wikipedia has to remove that
> policy and deal with it.  Has anyone posted any notice of this to wikien-l
> or the Village Pump on en, or do you think it's reasonable and fair to just
> do it without proper and fair notice and time to allow en to talk about it
> and figure out how to handle it?

Ok, my delivery of wikien mail was a bit behind.  There is a separate
discussion going on there.

> <george.herbert at gmail.com>
>

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


body:
Rich Holton wrote:
> Andrey wrote:
>
>>We talk about the English-language Wikipedia here, no? Other Wikimedia
>>projects allow usernames in non-Latin scripts, as best I know. For instance,
>>in Russian wikipedia, you may get a username in Cyrillic. Most complaints
>>are from those editors who have a non-Latin username in their national
>>wikipedia and fail to see why they can't keep it in English wikipedia. Best,
>>Andrey
>>
>
> Single User Login (SUL) _is_ coming soon. This means that someone with a
> login on the Russian Wikipedia will be able to have the same username on
> the English Wikipedia (just as an example).
>
> The question is, are we ready for this?
>
> -Rich
> _______________________________________________

More than "will be able to have". "Will have to have".
It will be one account for all projects.

Ant


from_name: Jon Harald Søby

subject: [Foundation-l] Oversight rights

body:
On 12/20/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is almost off-topic because it doesn't impact the main point of
> your post, we still do need a way of dealing with oversight requests,
> but I think this needs to be said:
>
> Oversight can, with great annoyance, be undone. Oversight's only real
> risk is causing misleading attribution, but the same thing is true of
> deletion so long as your standard of misleading is focused on casual
> readers rather admins (as it should be).
>
> The effect of an inappropriate release of checkuser data is an
> irreparable loss of privacy. I wouldn't go so far as saying that a
> carelessly performed checkuser could be life threatening, since if
> your life is on the line over any websites ability to protect your
> privacy thats your mistake.. but it is clear that often the result of
> a mistake made with checkuser data can not simply be undone.
>
> As such I don't think we should get in the practice of considering
> oversight a more sensitive privilege than checkuser.

I didn't mean that oversight is a more sensitive privilege, but that
the _requests_ for oversight are more sensitive. E.g. a request to ask
if user A is a sock of user B isn't sensitive, but a request to remove
a specific revision will be. If that is done in public on Meta, the
revision will be viewable by everyone until someone removes it. Hence
the suggestion about the mailing list, like it is done on en. But this
is probably a bit off-topic, you're right. ;-)

--
Best regards,
Jon Harald S?by

Website - http://www.alqualonde.com/
Wikipedia - http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruker:Jhs
MSN messenger - jhsoby at gmail.com
Skype - jon.harald.soby


subject: [Foundation-l] Oversight rights


body:
Jeff V. Merkey wrote:

I also need to add I have little time to devote to being an editor
beyond translation of Cherokee and the other languages. I do have
limited time to promote Cherokee and Native Languages, but being a full
time Wikipedia editor is not something I have the time
to focus on. I have numerous projects outside of WMF which make use of
Wikipedia content and I MUST focus on these areas
exclusively. Editing on the Cherokee Wikipedia by uploading completed
articles would be about as much spare bandwidth as
I could dedicate at present.

:-)

Jeff


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/19/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> [[MediaWiki:Bad image list]] does this, but in this case they were
> uploading the images they were using.

Time delays would work here - no image can be shown (on a highly
visible page, or on a page in general) until it's been on the system
for X number of minutes.

Steve


body:
The issue isn't really ethnocentric, or language-centric, it's
script-centric. SUL should have a feature that allows you to
transliterate your name into various scripts (or even does it for you
if possible, there isn't necessarily a one-to-one relationship between
characters [or sequences of characters] in different scripts, so it
could be quite hard) and it uses the appropriate one on each project.
The same name written in two different scripts is still the same name,
it's just written in a way that the people reading it can understand.

It's not just a matter of distinguishing between two Japanese, say,
names, it's also a matter of pronoucing them - it can slow down
reading quite a lot of some of the words aren't pronouncible to you
(even if you aren't reading out loud).


subject: [Wikitech-l] Auto-patrol preference

body:
On 12/20/06, henna <henna at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> I'm seriously in favor of creating a group with patrollers rights,
> preferably something that you get automatically (like autoconfirmed,
> but longer), but that you can be trown out from easily when patrolling
> the wrong stuff.  For this we would need a record of who patrolled
> what tho.

Yeah. There are squillions of trustworthy users who perform de facto
patrolling but for various reasons aren't admins.

I'm one. :)

Steve


subject: [Foundation-l] Translations fundraising.wikimedia.org

body:
habj wrote:

>2006/12/18, Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf at gmail.com>:
>
>
>>Most of it
>>should be possible to translate with merely a dictionary.
>>
>>
>
>I must warn against this attitude. Hardly anything can be translated
>with merely a dictionary, lacking context. If one tries, one ends up
>with a certain percentage of errors which sometimes just look a little
>funny and sometimes look very bad.
>
>/habj
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
Very true with Cherokee and native languages, which use particles to
denote complex tensing.

o-s-ti (me and everyone)
tsi (me)
o (everyone)
s-gv (its permanent)
s-di (sustained verb related condition)

Find those in a dictionary.

J


subject: [Wikitech-l] Firefox 2.0 spell checking

body:
On 12/13/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> And there is no need to apply spell checking to interwiki links,
> external URLs, template names or template parameter names.
> Perhaps the website needs to communicate this to the browser by
> some tags to the HTML, e.g. <textarea lang=nl syntax=mediawiki>?

What about syntax? Would we want it to ignore <nowkii> or attempt to fix it?

<drools thinking about how cool intellisense for Wikipedia would be...>

Steve


body:
On 12/20/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/20/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Rich Holton wrote:
> > > Andrey wrote:
> > >
> > >>We talk about the English-language Wikipedia here, no? Other Wikimedia
> > >>projects allow usernames in non-Latin scripts, as best I know. For
> > instance,
> > >>in Russian wikipedia, you may get a username in Cyrillic. Most
> > complaints
> > >>are from those editors who have a non-Latin username in their national
> > >>wikipedia and fail to see why they can't keep it in English wikipedia.
> > Best,
> > >>Andrey
> > >>
> > >
> > > Single User Login (SUL) _is_ coming soon. This means that someone with
> a
> > > login on the Russian Wikipedia will be able to have the same username
> on
> > > the English Wikipedia (just as an example).
> > >
> > > The question is, are we ready for this?
> > >
> > > -Rich
> > > _______________________________________________
> >
> > More than "will be able to have". "Will have to have".
> > It will be one account for all projects.
>
> >
>
> "BUT, soon, this will not be possible any more. All users will have only
> ONE account."
>
> Nothing is keeping users from creating a separate account under another
> name
> if they want to have different identities on different wikis for a
> legitimate reason.

When we go to one account I think it would be a good feature for people to
be able to have language-specific versions of their account name.

That would make it a lot easier for people to merge accounts, anyway.


body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Neil Harris schreef:
>
>> Stephen Bain wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On 12/20/06, Jon Harald S?by <jhsoby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> I can understand the rationale for this policy, but it _is_
>>>> ethnocentric, and it counters the problem from the wrong side, if you
>>>> know what I mean. Instead of trying to fix the problem, they try to
>>>> remove it.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I think it's horribly rude for the other admins on en: to be blocking
>>> people for using non-Latin characters in their username. A more polite
>>> approach would be to ask them to add a transliteration to their
>>> signature, that would satisfy many people.
>>>
>>> The problem is fairly simple, people who speak only English don't
>>> bother installing language support on their computers, even though
>>> (AFAIK) it is included with all operating systems these days. All they
>>> need to do is get their installation CD out and turn it on.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> The major problem is that, to most Latin-script-only contributors cannot
>> accurately memorize or distinguish many non-Latin names. For example,
>> the average Western user cannot clearly visualize -- or communicate to
>> others -- the differences between (chosen at random) ?, ?, and ?, all
>> of which look remarkably similar to them, even though they are
>> immediately and obviously distinguishable by any Chinese reader.
>>
>> Since Wikipedia needs names to be human-recognizable in order to
>> function, this needs fixing, and since it is impractical to educate all
>> Wikipedia contributors to literacy in all major world script systems,
>> transliteration -- or some other disambiguation system -- will be
>> necessary in order to make names distinct to human readers who are
>> unfamiliar with other writing systems.
>>
>> Possibility 1:
>>
>> For example, a user with the Japanese name ? could add a Latin-script
>> transliteration ("Takeshi"), and appear on Latin-script wikis as
>>
>> [[User:? (Takeshi)]]
>>
>> or possibly:
>>
>> [[User:Takeshi (?)]]
>>
>> Of course, to avoid any appearance of linguistic imperialism, the same
>> facility should be available for users with Latin-script names to add
>> transliterations in other scripts.
>>
>> Possibility 2:
>>
>> All usernames could have their internal Wikipedia IDs appended, perhaps
>> in the form of hex numbers, allowing them to be uniquely identified,
>> regardless of the culture of the readers, providing only that they can
>> read hex digits. For example:
>>
>> ? (x610d49)
>>
>> Ideally, a unique fixed-length hash of the internal ID number would be
>> used, to avoid the emergence of a "pecking order" based on one user
>> having an earlier-issued ID number than another.
>>
>> -- Neil
>>
> Hoi,
> Given how you phrase things you assume that all wikipedia users can read
> the Latin script. That is incorrect. When you assume that the English
> language Wikipedia can set the policies in this, I would hate it when
> the non Latin language Wikipedias by retaliating and expect the
> transliteration of the users. This is a wrong route. Do not go this way.
>
> Thanks,
>       *?????????*
>

Gerard,

The problem does indeed occur symmetrically, and while I phrased my
reply in terms of making non-Latin names unambiguous on
native-Latin-script Wikipedia editions, you might want to re-read my
comment, and notice the bit that said:

> Of course, to avoid any appearance of linguistic imperialism, the same
> facility should be available for users with Latin-script names to add
> transliterations in other scripts.

-- Neil


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 41, Issue 153

body:
On 12/19/06, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't mean that we should only use sources that are *easily*
> available, because that would be very limiting, but they must be
> reasonably available in the English-speaking world. I can't be precise
> about what I mean by "reasonable," but broadly speaking the man in the
> street should not have to move mountains, or pay a great deal of
> money, to obtain the material if he's determined to find it, and the
> source must be a published, citable one, not something circulated
> within a limited group of people.

Is the December 18, 1857 morning edition of [[The New York Times]] an
acceptable source?  It's rather hard to find a copy of it these days.
How about the [[ISO 9000]] standard?  The International Standards
Organization charges thousands of dollars for access to it.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Andrey

body:
I find this complaint ill-advised. This is an English-language project;
English language uses Latin script; ergo, non-Latin usernames are not
acceptable. Naturally, I want to know the usernames of people I speak to,
but I would not know how to refer to an editor who spells his name in
Japanese or Armenian, since I can't read either Japanese or Armenian. There
is nothing ethnocentric about that. Best, Andrey

On 12/20/06, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Forwarding from foundation-l, after a brief discussion between myself and
> the original poster. See more at:
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-December/thread.html
>
> "English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects other communities" --
> specifically, our username policy, and the practice of blocking non-Latin
> usernames on sight.
>
> Seems a number of multi-wiki users have felt pushed away or chagrined by
> this policy. Single-login seems like it might render the whole thing a
> moot
> point -- are we ready for the implications of that? Or does anything need
> to
> be done? Do we know how single-login will affect each wiki's ability to
> set
> and enforce a username policy, and if so, should changes to the policy
> result?
>
> Myself, I'm not sure of the answers to any of these questions, just yet.
> But
> it seems like we may as well discuss it.
>
> Apologies if I just happened to miss a prior thread -- if it's already
> happened, I don't remember seeing it.
>
> -Luna
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com>
> Date: Dec 20, 2006 12:07 AM
> Subject: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects
> other
> communities
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
>
> 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.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> KIZU Naoko
> Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
> * Nessuna poesia prima di noi *
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Andrew Garrett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Main site live again

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
>
> On 12/20/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > ... Visibly, this introduces a field on
> > Special:Recentchanges showing the number of characters added or removed
> > by each edit, giving an impression of the magnitude of changes.
> >
> > This figure has been available for some time on the IRC feeds of
> > changes, but is now stored in the database for display in the recent
> > changes list.
>
> Can this (theoretically or practically) appear on the watchlist page as
> well?

Absolutely. Stick it on bugzilla and we'll look at it.

Andrew Garrett
(Werdna)


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

body:
On 20/12/06, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree, that needs to be changed, but I'm not sure what to. We need
> to define what kind of specialist knowledge is ok, and what isn't. For
> example, is being able to speak Latin acceptable specialist knowledge
> to use, basically meaning Latin speakers can translate the primary
> source in the article? (It's definately preferable to cite a
> translation, but if there isn't one, it may or may not be ok for a
> Wikipedian to translate it, we need to decide.)

Mmm. Let's say there is a significant Russian novel - significant but
obscure. No English translation has been made; English scholarship on
it is basically limited to recognising it exists.

But there are plenty of Russian sources. Should enwiki have an article
on this work?

(The answer, of course, is "yes" - for the benefit of English-speaking
students of Russian literature. Our policies should never prohibit us
doing transformative work like telling speakers of one language what a
source in another language says - because if we don't allow that,
we're going to have crazily crippled encyclopedias for smaller
third-world languages...)

> The key point here is that your source for the statement that all the
> papers say the same thing isn't just the papers, it's the database. If
> there is a way to reliable cite the database, rather than just the
> sources it contains (a link to the search results page, perhaps), then
> it might be ok, but just citing the papers definately isn't.

A while back I wrote about a self-publicising vanity author. One of
the details I'd liked to have note was the complete (or near-complete)
absence of his books in public library catalogues, but it's almost
impossible to actually find a way to cite a "negative search" much
less a positive result...

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

body:
Brion,

I'll give you $500.00 if you get it done by January. You also have to
fix my SVG bug too.

Jeff

James Hare wrote:

>Brion, I will redirect my $100 donation to Wikimedia straight to you if you
>get SUL up by January.
>
>On 12/20/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>George Herbert schreef:
>>
>>
>>>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.
>>>
>>>
>>Hoi,
>>With Single User Login, this scheme will not be possible anymore .. a
>>user is THAT user and no one else can impersonate him by having the same
>>user. So the basic argument here is incorrect. It will no longer be
>>possible and, this whole ugly affair demonstrates admirably that we need
>>SUL as soon as possible ..
>>
>>PLEASE BRION .. get this over and done with.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>    Gerard
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
>>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 12/20/06, Christophe Millet <kipmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > * for the moment, non latin accounts are blocked on sight.
>
>
> True, I've just tried that and been blocked after 1 or 2 minutes
> (before having time for a single edit actually),
> I don't find it very welcoming...
>
> I got that very friendly message:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:%E1%93%82%E1%93%AA%E1%93%9A%E1%93%B1%E1%91%A6%E1%91%8E%E1%90%B9
>
> Kip.
>
> P.S.: My user account means "keep cool" in inuktitut (everybody should
> install that font
> just because it's fun to read).

Of course, if you don't have that font installed, it comes out as
???????


subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

body:
> A while back I wrote about a self-publicising vanity author. One of
> the details I'd liked to have note was the complete (or near-complete)
> absence of his books in public library catalogues, but it's almost
> impossible to actually find a way to cite a "negative search" much
> less a positive result...

Indeed, that would end up being OR - quite simple OR, but OR all the
same. It's annoying when you know something that apparently no-one has
published, but there isn't much we can do about it. (Unless you happen
to be an expert on the subject and can publish it yourself)


from_name: Dominic

subject: [Foundation-l] Oversight rights

body:
Jon Harald S?by wrote:
> I think that we should use a mailing list for
> such requests, either using the existing oversight-l or stewards-l, or
> creating a new mailing list, for example oversight-requests-l or
> something like that, so that people can send their requests there, to
> be handled by stewards. Does that sound like a good idea?
>
>
I think the mailing list as we've used it so far has been a good idea.
Any potential oversight request should have a list it can be brought to.
A global mailing list for all oversighters and stewards might be
convenient in that the stewards could be on it, too, and so it would be
an easy way to make sure all requests get to someone that can answer
them. We should probably just subscribe all oversighters and stewards to
the current oversight-l and update links to it to indicate it's global.
I don't know if any new oversighters have been made yet, but all the
current stewards could be subscribed immediately (Essjay is the list admin).

A potential problem is that frequently people sending mail to
oversight-l don't include links to the revision they're talking about,
or what's wrong with it, or much of anything at all, and now they will
probably not tell us what project they are referring to, either. But,
people will be people, and no amount of instructions will probably
change that. ;-)

Dominic


subject: [Foundation-l] Oversight rights


subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 19/12/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:

> There is one already: just click the "edit" tab and look beneath the
> edit box.  I've been wondering, as I've been reading this thread, why
> people don't just go through the list and protect all the templates
> listed there.  After all, that seems like the easiest solution by far.

It's a hassle, but I've done it. And last time, I picked up two bits
of vandalism - clever css include things, too - which hadn't been
reverted or protected against.

We should have absolutely no qualms about full-protecting templates
used in high-profile pages or across a large number of pages. I would
say that at least a third of the vandalism complaints we get can be
traced to these.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


body:
On 12/20/06, Kusma <kusma.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/20/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at 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.

In part because usernames that use non-Latin character sets are completely
indistinguishable to someone without those fonts loaded.

Hard to figure out if ??????? is the good user and ??????? is the bad one.

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.

That would be nice.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

body:
> In all seriousness, I think the policy should be that any special knowledge
> needed to understand the article should be included somewhere in Wikipedia.

So foreign language sources are out, then? I think that's a good
guideline in a lot of situations, but not all... some types of
specialist knowledge aren't the kinds of things you find in an
encyclopedia.


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Neil Harris schreef:
> Stephen Bain wrote:
>
>> On 12/20/06, Jon Harald S?by <jhsoby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I can understand the rationale for this policy, but it _is_
>>> ethnocentric, and it counters the problem from the wrong side, if you
>>> know what I mean. Instead of trying to fix the problem, they try to
>>> remove it.
>>>
>>>
>> I think it's horribly rude for the other admins on en: to be blocking
>> people for using non-Latin characters in their username. A more polite
>> approach would be to ask them to add a transliteration to their
>> signature, that would satisfy many people.
>>
>> The problem is fairly simple, people who speak only English don't
>> bother installing language support on their computers, even though
>> (AFAIK) it is included with all operating systems these days. All they
>> need to do is get their installation CD out and turn it on.
>>
>>
>>
>
> The major problem is that, to most Latin-script-only contributors cannot
> accurately memorize or distinguish many non-Latin names. For example,
> the average Western user cannot clearly visualize -- or communicate to
> others -- the differences between (chosen at random) ?, ?, and ?, all
> of which look remarkably similar to them, even though they are
> immediately and obviously distinguishable by any Chinese reader.
>
> Since Wikipedia needs names to be human-recognizable in order to
> function, this needs fixing, and since it is impractical to educate all
> Wikipedia contributors to literacy in all major world script systems,
> transliteration -- or some other disambiguation system -- will be
> necessary in order to make names distinct to human readers who are
> unfamiliar with other writing systems.
>
> Possibility 1:
>
> For example, a user with the Japanese name ? could add a Latin-script
> transliteration ("Takeshi"), and appear on Latin-script wikis as
>
> [[User:? (Takeshi)]]
>
> or possibly:
>
> [[User:Takeshi (?)]]
>
> Of course, to avoid any appearance of linguistic imperialism, the same
> facility should be available for users with Latin-script names to add
> transliterations in other scripts.
>
> Possibility 2:
>
> All usernames could have their internal Wikipedia IDs appended, perhaps
> in the form of hex numbers, allowing them to be uniquely identified,
> regardless of the culture of the readers, providing only that they can
> read hex digits. For example:
>
> ? (x610d49)
>
> Ideally, a unique fixed-length hash of the internal ID number would be
> used, to avoid the emergence of a "pecking order" based on one user
> having an earlier-issued ID number than another.
>
> -- Neil
Hoi,
Given how you phrase things you assume that all wikipedia users can read
the Latin script. That is incorrect. When you assume that the English
language Wikipedia can set the policies in this, I would hate it when
the non Latin language Wikipedias by retaliating and expect the
transliteration of the users. This is a wrong route. Do not go this way.

Thanks,
      *?????????*


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Neil Harris wrote:
> Different-script blocking on en: must therefore stop as soon as SUL is
> implemented.
>
> But, since human-readable usernames are essential to managing the wiki
> system, and for many people names not in their native script are not
> human-readable, there must necessarily be some sort of solution to the
> name-incomprehensibility problem before SUL goes live.

I should just point out that SUL *changes nothing* with regard to this
situation.

It has always been preferable for the same username to mean the same
person on all wikis, but it isn't enforced until the system is ready to
do that. That's all SUL does.

A person may have different usernames on each wiki; they've always been
and always will be free to do that. SUL does not change that.

A person may also use a nickname for their signatures which is cuter or
easier to type. Always have been, always will be. SUL does not change that.

It might be useful to be able to make nicks more pervasive in their
visibility. SUL does not change that.

That doesn't depend on SUL, nor does SUL depend on it in any way.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 20/12/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>What Aphaia means is that people have asked to change their Japanese
>>name because of the insistence of the English project that people have a
>>Latin name. With the long hoped for single login this policy of the
>>English Wikipedia HAS to go the way of the dinosaur. It is unfortunate
>>that this policy is still active.
>>
>>
>
>
>Ah, got it. In that case, Aphaia may care to post to wikien-l or to
>the various anti-vandalism pages on en:wp where the policy is
>implemented ... not to a list which very few en:wp editors actually
>read, as I believe was pointed out to her last time this came up.
>
>That is: actually make a slight effort to convince the people involved
>by consensus, rather than appearing to demand top-down imposition of a
>new policy on a wiki by the Foundation. That trick is somewhat less
>likely to work.
>
>
>
Unfortunately trying to convince people whose heads are fully entrenched
in the arses of Euro/American culture is going to be slightly impossible
as I have noticed myself earlier in other debates. People who do not
travel the world nor are open to other countries ways of life will never
ever understand why some things they feel from there pink spectacles are
acceptable do not work outside of their own living space.

I would actually encourage Japanese wikipedia to forbid usernames in
latin characters to get the point accross.

Waerth


body:
Um. I think a policy of expecting people to have usernames readable in the
primary character set of the Wikipedia is perfectly reasonable, whatever the
language, and nothing to flip out about.

Maybe you should reconsider your outrage.

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
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> With SUL intended to provide Single User Login, the functionality and
> use of SUL is frustrated when people are then forced to create a user
> when the English language Wikipedia insists that it has to be in a Latin
> script.

Don't tell me that; tell the idiots who are trying to push a
ban-on-sight policy.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Neil Harris schreef:
>
>>
>> Gerard,
>>
>> The problem does indeed occur symmetrically, and while I phrased my
>> reply in terms of making non-Latin names unambiguous on
>> native-Latin-script Wikipedia editions, you might want to re-read my
>> comment, and notice the bit that said:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Of course, to avoid any appearance of linguistic imperialism, the same
>>> facility should be available for users with Latin-script names to add
>>> transliterations in other scripts.
>>>
>>>
>> -- Neil
>>
> I can only say that I disagree.
> Thanks,
>
>       *?????????*
>
>

Gerard,

Given that you disagree with both of my suggestions of possible
solutions for the script-incomprehensibility problem, perhaps you could
suggest a better solution to the problem, preferably one that does not
involve the users of every Wikipedia learning to be literate in every
writing system supported by Wikipedia?

-- ?? ???


from_name: Steve Block

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
NSLE (Wikipedia) wrote:
> The images are being uploaded by sleeper socks old enough to upload them,
> and protecting every single template on TFA (including
> transcluded-on-transcluded ones) can be tedious for the admins. I've
> suggested perhaps substituting the templates before they become TFA (and
> re-transcluding after), but do the other list readers have any solution?

Make the whole of template space editable by admins only, and loosen the
grip on adminship.  Templates are probably an area which should be kept
to trusted users, and admins are our trusted users.  Might make the
community face up to rewiring RFA.

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.409 / Virus Database: 268.15.25/593 - Release Date: 19/12/06


body:
We talk about the English-language Wikipedia here, no? Other Wikimedia
projects allow usernames in non-Latin scripts, as best I know. For instance,
in Russian wikipedia, you may get a username in Cyrillic. Most complaints
are from those editors who have a non-Latin username in their national
wikipedia and fail to see why they can't keep it in English wikipedia. Best,
Andrey

On 12/20/06, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/20/06, Andrey <yaroslavl at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I find this complaint ill-advised. This is an English-language project;
> >
>
> No.
>
> Wikipedia is a multilingual project. You need to take hindsight and
> consider
> users not as accounts, but as people who edit on different Wikimedia
> projects and in different languages. This is precisely the philosophy
> that's
> behind SUL.
>
> --
> Guillaume Paumier
> Disciplus Simplex
> http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 20/12/06, JePe <jepe at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Also the interwikis aren't displayed anymore on the resulting page. On
> nl.wikipedia and some other wikis we have interwikis including the MAGICNUMBER,
> so on Special:Booksources they are displayed as normal interwiki links to the
> page in another language with the same ISBN.

I'll look into this; I must have introduced a moderate regression somewhere.

Rob Church


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Featured Article

body:
On 12/20/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:53:32 +0000, "Thomas Dalton"
> <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Yeah, but if it was on a voluntary basis, it wouldn't be that much work
> >> after the initial rush.  Not every trusted user would want/need access
> to
> >> templates, for instance.
>
> >A lot of them would want it despite not needing it - everyone wants to
> >be trusted. Maybe a specific "template" group, rather than a more
> >general "trusted" group would be good, it would make it easier to
> >convince people that it's "no big deal".
>
> The real problem here is that trusted users should be given the sysop
> bit and are not.  No big deal?  Not these days.
>
> Guy (JzG)

Could be a worse deal.

I think I understand why my RFA was controversial and failed, and to some
degree the "please don't be too controversial" RFA criterion makes a lot of
sense.

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


body:
Neil Harris schreef:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> Neil Harris schreef:
>>
>>
>>> Stephen Bain wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On 12/20/06, Jon Harald S?by <jhsoby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I can understand the rationale for this policy, but it _is_
>>>>> ethnocentric, and it counters the problem from the wrong side, if you
>>>>> know what I mean. Instead of trying to fix the problem, they try to
>>>>> remove it.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> I think it's horribly rude for the other admins on en: to be blocking
>>>> people for using non-Latin characters in their username. A more polite
>>>> approach would be to ask them to add a transliteration to their
>>>> signature, that would satisfy many people.
>>>>
>>>> The problem is fairly simple, people who speak only English don't
>>>> bother installing language support on their computers, even though
>>>> (AFAIK) it is included with all operating systems these days. All they
>>>> need to do is get their installation CD out and turn it on.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> The major problem is that, to most Latin-script-only contributors cannot
>>> accurately memorize or distinguish many non-Latin names. For example,
>>> the average Western user cannot clearly visualize -- or communicate to
>>> others -- the differences between (chosen at random) ?, ?, and ?, all
>>> of which look remarkably similar to them, even though they are
>>> immediately and obviously distinguishable by any Chinese reader.
>>>
>>> Since Wikipedia needs names to be human-recognizable in order to
>>> function, this needs fixing, and since it is impractical to educate all
>>> Wikipedia contributors to literacy in all major world script systems,
>>> transliteration -- or some other disambiguation system -- will be
>>> necessary in order to make names distinct to human readers who are
>>> unfamiliar with other writing systems.
>>>
>>> Possibility 1:
>>>
>>> For example, a user with the Japanese name ? could add a Latin-script
>>> transliteration ("Takeshi"), and appear on Latin-script wikis as
>>>
>>> [[User:? (Takeshi)]]
>>>
>>> or possibly:
>>>
>>> [[User:Takeshi (?)]]
>>>
>>> Of course, to avoid any appearance of linguistic imperialism, the same
>>> facility should be available for users with Latin-script names to add
>>> transliterations in other scripts.
>>>
>>> Possibility 2:
>>>
>>> All usernames could have their internal Wikipedia IDs appended, perhaps
>>> in the form of hex numbers, allowing them to be uniquely identified,
>>> regardless of the culture of the readers, providing only that they can
>>> read hex digits. For example:
>>>
>>> ? (x610d49)
>>>
>>> Ideally, a unique fixed-length hash of the internal ID number would be
>>> used, to avoid the emergence of a "pecking order" based on one user
>>> having an earlier-issued ID number than another.
>>>
>>> -- Neil
>>>
>>>
>> Hoi,
>> Given how you phrase things you assume that all wikipedia users can read
>> the Latin script. That is incorrect. When you assume that the English
>> language Wikipedia can set the policies in this, I would hate it when
>> the non Latin language Wikipedias by retaliating and expect the
>> transliteration of the users. This is a wrong route. Do not go this way.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>       *?????????*
>>
>>
>
> Gerard,
>
> The problem does indeed occur symmetrically, and while I phrased my
> reply in terms of making non-Latin names unambiguous on
> native-Latin-script Wikipedia editions, you might want to re-read my
> comment, and notice the bit that said:
>
>
>> Of course, to avoid any appearance of linguistic imperialism, the same
>> facility should be available for users with Latin-script names to add
>> transliterations in other scripts.
>>
>
> -- Neil
I can only say that I disagree.
Thanks,

      *?????????*


body:
On 20/12/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20/12/06, JePe <jepe at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> > Also the interwikis aren't displayed anymore on the resulting page. On
> > nl.wikipedia and some other wikis we have interwikis including the MAGICNUMBER,
> > so on Special:Booksources they are displayed as normal interwiki links to the
> > page in another language with the same ISBN.
>
> I'll look into this; I must have introduced a moderate regression somewhere.

D'oh, I'm such a moron sometimes. Yes, my fault, sorry. Fixing it now.

Rob Church


body:
On 12/20/06, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For the record, the relevant policy is tagged as disputed, as I've done so
> now. See [[:w:en:Wikipedia:Username]].
>
> It would be really nice if the users who have participated in the
> discussion
> here could do so in the project talk page.
>
> Titoxd.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen
> Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 5:04 PM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects
> other communities
>
> Brion Vibber schreef:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Neil Harris wrote:
> >
> >> Different-script blocking on en: must therefore stop as soon as SUL is
> >> implemented.
> >>
> >> But, since human-readable usernames are essential to managing the wiki
> >> system, and for many people names not in their native script are not
> >> human-readable, there must necessarily be some sort of solution to the
> >> name-incomprehensibility problem before SUL goes live.
> >>
> >
> > I should just point out that SUL *changes nothing* with regard to this
> > situation.
> >
> > It has always been preferable for the same username to mean the same
> > person on all wikis, but it isn't enforced until the system is ready to
> > do that. That's all SUL does.
> >
> > A person may have different usernames on each wiki; they've always been
> > and always will be free to do that. SUL does not change that.
> >
> > A person may also use a nickname for their signatures which is cuter or
> > easier to type. Always have been, always will be. SUL does not change
> that.
> >
> > It might be useful to be able to make nicks more pervasive in their
> > visibility. SUL does not change that.
> >
> > That doesn't depend on SUL, nor does SUL depend on it in any way.
> Hoi,
> With SUL intended to provide Single User Login, the functionality and
> use of SUL is frustrated when people are then forced to create a user
> when the English language Wikipedia insists that it has to be in a Latin
> script.
>
> You can not implement SUL and then say that it is OK to frustrate its
> central premiss.
>
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

I moved the disupted tag to the non-latin characters paragraph, from the
overall subsection, to avoid confusion.

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


body:
On 20/12/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20/12/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 20/12/06, JePe <jepe at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> > > Also the interwikis aren't displayed anymore on the resulting page. On
> > > nl.wikipedia and some other wikis we have interwikis including the MAGICNUMBER,
> > > so on Special:Booksources they are displayed as normal interwiki links to the
> > > page in another language with the same ISBN.
> >
> > I'll look into this; I must have introduced a moderate regression somewhere.
>
> D'oh, I'm such a moron sometimes. Yes, my fault, sorry. Fixing it now.

Right, that should be corrected as of r18469.

Rob Church


subject: [Wikitech-l] Main site live again

body:
On 20/12/06, Andrew Garrett <andrew at epstone.net> wrote:
> > Can this (theoretically or practically) appear on the watchlist page as
> > well?
>
> Absolutely. Stick it on bugzilla and we'll look at it.

IIRC, it's already there.

Rob Church


from_name: Aphaia

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

body:
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.

Cheers,
--
KIZU Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * Nessuna poesia prima di noi *


body:
On 12/20/06, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> We're getting there.

Can you quantify that at all? Crap articles are being created far
faster than old articles are being improved. That much seems obvious.

Steve