Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Template:User en-0

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was Keep The discussion had valid points on both sides, but the keeps were stronger, suggest discussing this further as desired at Wikipedia talk:Babel. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:59, 1 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Template:User en-0 (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

This is technically separate Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Templates for deleted categories in that Category:User en-0 for some reason hasn't been deleted. These don't break the userbox requirements but is there really a need for a userbox for people on English Wikipedia who allegedly don't understand English? A smattering review of the editors who use this tag are at least level 1 (other than trolls) or else they really wouldn't be able to edit here. In the past, the categories for other languages have been deleted (see an intermediate discussion and the Russian one) while there's a current discussion on the other userboxes at the moment. Ricky81682 (talk) 18:48, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete any user that asserts no undrstanding of English should be blocked. Not needed. Legacypac (talk) 20:53, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  Then since I made these edits (mostly to Rhestr Mesurau a Deddfau Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru) whilst claiming to not understand Welsh, you should get me blocked at Wicipedia Cymraeg. I'm sure Llywelyn2000 (talk · contribs) - who is gweinyddwr there - would be willing to do that if you are not. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:46, 24 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm not blocked at cywiki yet, so I made this edit. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:07, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete as per Legacypac (kind of, blocking is too much but clearly shouldn't be here).~ Rob^Talk 21:01, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - Especially with global logins, a non-English speaker may be making changes not requiring any proficiency in English. If you believe there are no such editors, I will present myself as somewhat of an example. I have editted other language wikis were I have zero capability of understanding the language. In my case, it was adding images to articles. It's easy enough to figure out what the right parameter is in an infobox, or add a file. Somebody making similar contributions her on the English wikipedia may want to ensure other editors are aware that their English language is extremely limited. -- Whpq (talk) 22:27, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  Is zero really accurate then? I'd say push to calling themselves en-1, that's more realistic. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:40, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  No, you can still be zero. Take a random example of bn:সহরসা_জেলা - if I challenged you to add an image and update the URL in the infobox, I bet you could do it just with Wiki "muscle memory" rather than any kind of understanding of Bengali, even if the script may look alien to Westerners. And if someone wanted to ask you about your edit, I imagine you'd want to make clear that you had absolutely no chance of understanding them.Le Deluge (talk) 23:31, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree. My ability in the other languages is zero. Level one is basic capability in the language. The ability to tease out basic syntax for adding an image does not imply any basic capability in the language. --Whpq (talk) 23:52, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep As I've said below, this is the one case where a lang-0 template makes sense. On en.wiki you assume that everyone can speak English but not speak any other language, on fr.wiki French but no others and so on. However if you speak the universal language of Wiki then good-faith editors can make useful edits on Wikipedias where they don't speak the local language. I've personally come across two cases myself. One was editing the infobox of a town in (??) India, I found the latest census (2012 say) population and put that in the English article, then went to the ?? Hindi article looking for pictures and found that the infobox there had the 2002 population. I don't speak Hindi, but I don't need to to work out what to do in that case. Similarly there was a free photo from the US or UK government, of I think an Albanian ship on exercises with the photographer's ship. I don't speak Albanian, but I thought it was useful to add it to the Albanian article because a)Albanians are probably the ones most interested in that particular ship and b)editors from other Wikipedias will probably look at the Albanian article first for images for their own language article. Checking interwiki links are another one where it's possible to do useful work without knowing the language. In both cases, if a "local" editor had wanted to discuss the census data or image with me, then they would have been wasting their time talking to me in Hindi or Albanian, although no doubt I would have had a go with Google Translate. OTOH, I can see the argument that this box is likely to be an idiot-magnet and good-faith editors who do want to engage will do what I do with "other" wikis and redirect my talk page to en.wiki which is where I spend most of my time. But I can still see a point to a en-0 box (if not category) on en.wiki. (edit clash - Whpq has beat me to it!) Le Deluge (talk) 22:41, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  But is the userspace box really necessary? The category is likely to be deleted if I take that to CFD given the mass precedents. Like I said, it doesn't technically violate the incivility rules so it's more of a "is this appropriate" in the vaguest sense of the term. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:48, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  I think a reasonable person would see that the home language on a wiki is a sufficiently different case that it wouldn't necessarily be subject to the precedent. Certainly I see them as significantly different, not being able to discuss an edit in the language of that edit is a significant handicap, whereas other lang-0's are just cruft. Le Deluge (talk) 23:31, 23 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  Some interesting points about editing without knowing the language. I've done a bit of that too. Humm, I don't use userboxes, so don't matter much to me, but I'd NEVER put 0 boxes for all the languages I know nothing about. Legacypac (talk) 04:11, 24 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep per my argument below, as well as per Le Deluge, with whom I happen to agree on this particular userbox. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 04:59, 24 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep It's an excellent way for non-English speakers to advertise the fact, in case somebody wishes to communicate with them about some edit they made on this Wikipedia. I always use the xx-0 templates on other Wikipedias, it indicates my non-understanding of their language, see recent examples at e.g. lij:Utente:Redrose64 or pa:ਵਰਤੋਂਕਾਰ:Redrose64. Notice the non-use of pa-0 at lij, and vice versa --Redrose64 (talk) 13:46, 24 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep I try and help all minority languages; just created a list of Scottish people on gdwiki but I don't spak Gaelic. I should start using this template! And thanks to User:Redrose64 for all his wonderful edits on cywiki (Welsh). Llywelyn2000 (talk) 14:16, 24 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as per Legacypac (but I wouldn't go as far as advocating blocking...)TheOverflow (talk) 10:06, 28 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, I would say. After all, English is the lingua franca of the Internet, but still there's a great number of Internet and even Wikipedia users who can't communicate or contribute even "with a basic level of English", but might occasionally end up on the pages of the English Wikipedia, due to very little or no information at all about some subject in any of the Wikipedias that they can understand at basic level. Don't forget that en-0 includes the option "(or understands it with considerable difficulty)", not only "does not understand English"! I don't speak any Norwegian, Danish or Icelandic, but due to my knowledge of Swedish, I occasionally check some pages on Wikipedias no/nn, da or is, just to see if there's more information available there. I've even found help from German or French Wikipedia sometimes, even though I'd still say my level in either of those two languages is 0: I've never studied German, but I've noticed I can "decode" a lot (and usually correctly or almost correctly) based on my knowledge of English and Swedish. French? I studied it for two years when I was 13–15 years old. I've forgotten practically everything, but still, after I had lost the address and telephone number of my French friend while moving, I was able to call her mother and make myself understood, get my friend's new phone number, and give my new phone number to her mother to pass on to her. But I most certainly would not call that fr-1, since we were only able to use names (my introduction, and using my friend's name — I had visited my friend as a teenager, and then later for her wedding — so her mother knew me and my name), the word "telephone" with a questioning intonation, and numbers from 0 to 9. (That was the hardest part, to make her understand that I can't understand numbers in groups of two, such as "eighty-three" in French, and that she could only use numbers from 0 to 9 so that I'd understand.) When looking at a Wikipedia page in a language I don't understand, but can sort of "decode" to some extent, I usually skim through the text to see if it looks like it contains the information I'm looking for. But since there are many false friends between Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/Icelandic (e.g. Swedish "dräng" means "a farmhand", whereas Danish "dreng" means "a young boy", and the verb "le" in Danish and Norwegian means "to laugh", whereas in Swedish it only means "to smile"), I usually use Google translate — even though it doesn't translate too well, it helps me to understand the basic meaning of the text: the parts I didn't understand, or parts I misunderstood because in Swedish the same word has a different meaning. Google translate helps me also with German and French. If I noticed that there were some problems with the info box (e.g. a missing picture, or a clearly incorrect picture, or some other easily correctable info — such as more recent census data like Le Deluge mentioned on 22:41, 23 March 2016 (UTC) — I might very well make that one change I could be sure of not ruining the article, but helping with it. However, I might not be able to understand it if somebody commented on my talk page — especially if they wrote more colloquially than they would on a proper article, Google translate might not be able to help me. A person understanding only a couple of words of English could still be able to add a photo to a Wikipedia article in English, and might want to state on their user page that they "understand English with considerable difficulty", while listing the languages they understand at basic level or better, so that if one wants to comment on their talk page, one will either be able to choose a language they have in common, or at least write so easy language — with no slang, idioms or colloquialisms — that even a first year student or someone needing the help of Google translate would be able to understand the comment. —Ylva Carennah (talk) 03:08, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.