Let's imagine that I'm writing a cyrillic program. The users are most likely not english, the stakeholders are not english, the examples that the program works

Let's imagine that I'm writing a cyrillic program. The users are most likely not english, the stakeholders are not english, the examples that the program works with are not ascii. Yet, you insist that in the readme I'm not using anything cyrillic related and use ascii instead. If I happen to find an arabic readme, then I'll know that either I'm not the target audience, or that the author does not know english and might loose my contributions. Neither of those gives me the right to open a PR and insist that the readme is adjusted for my use case only and degrades the user experience of others. What I strongly disagree with you is that from the principal of "be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept" you choose to take only the first part and forget the latter. Ascii is nice when it is applicable for the use case, but it is not universally applicable and assuming so should be a personal mistake, not tax on everyone. Maybe the disagreement between us is in how we define target audience. You imagine that if it is published in Github, then it must be readable to anyone there. I think that if the project is ment to help certain type of people, then it it must be optimized for them, not for people who would never bother using it anyways.