User talk:Slaunger/Archives/2012/3

Username discussion

I'm commenting here because I think we're ready to close the general discussion.

Can you honestly say that you can distinguish names written in all of the non-Latin languages we support? That's 15 of the 42 languages that have Village Pumps and about 70 of the 284 in all. Certainly asking people to add a Latin name to their sig is asymmetric, but the world is asymmetric. I doubt very much that there is any Commons user who cannot recognize Latin characters. Note that all of the non-Latin keyboards shown at Keyboard_layout#Keyboard_layouts_for_non-Latin_alphabetic_scripts have Latin characters on them. I have traveled in places with seven different non-Latin languages and all had road-signs in Latin letters in addition to the local language (Israel often has Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic, and Eritrea often has Tigrinya, Arabic, and Latin).

I do my very best to be helpful to non-English speakers in their own tongue -- using Google translate for short interactions and finding someone who speaks the language for more complicated ones, so I honor our multilingual charter. But, with that understood, I don't think it is a good use of any of our time to learn to distinguish names in 70 non-Latin languages. Hence my proposed closure, with which you agree, I think.      Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk to me) 14:53, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi James, Thanks for writing here. I appreciate that. No, I can not honestly say that I can distinguish names written in all of the non-Latin languages we support. I believe, that if I encountered 100 different user names in Arab, I would have hard time distinguishing, if they were taken out of context. I can honestly say though, that the ones I have encountered so far are resolvable in my internal pattern matching logic in my brain . I also agree that having latin transcription in the signature is helpful, and that a recommendation is in order. I object however to banning and requirements to avoid increasing asymmetry. Concerning the keyboards I only noted that about half of them had latin letters written on them, but nevermind. But I am entriely happy with the proposed closure, that it is a recommendation for users active in the community. The occasional drop-by user who merely uploads a few images to the local wiki should not be expected to have a latin translitteration. And that is well reflected in the proposed closure. Thank you. --Slaunger (talk) 15:26, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

The truth is, you're right, I overstated the case. [[User:]]عباد ديرانية changed his sig to Abbad_Dira and left a new question with the new sig on my talk page. I was able to carefully compare the linked user page to the old sig and realize it was the same person.

A good conclusion to the discussion. Thanks for your support.      Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk to me) 13:51, 6 March 2012 (UTC)