Alec wrote: I strongly oppose BADSITES, and I am the kind of person who really needs a happy, civil working environment, and I think it important for the preservation of that to both openly oppose BADSITES and to do it using my own name and reputation. You can't win debates in Wikipedia by sockpuppeting. It is just not a very useful strategy, even without getting into the ethical issues. BADSITES was a badly written policy proposal and it died a rightful death. At the same time, virtually no one thinks that we need nothing in that general neighborhood... there really is such a thing as a link that should not be in wikipedia, and there really is such a thing as personal attack through linking. The hard part is getting something accomplished in an environment where people are hurting and where other people are afraid of speaking out. Let's try to move past that. --Jimbo

Todd Allen wrote: So let's see if I understand. The motivation that led to BADSITES was that outing a Wikipedian's identity was bad behaviour. What you now suggest is that all socks should have their identity outed. Am I wrong to perceive an element of institutionalized hypocrisy in that proposal? Ec

On 01/11/2007, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's not quite that simple. Normally, we say "if you personally, the Real You, don't want to be linked to your work, use a pseudonym". But what if you are able and willing to be linked to part of your work, but you would rather disclaim the link for the rest? There are a large number of topics that are more "embarrassing" than controversial. The simplest case study (because I'm lazy) is myself - when not setting out to write, I tend to copyedit as I go, and some nights you can read my contribution history and pretty much follow the chain of my reading through the evening. There have been times when I've stopped myself doing something - or deliberately signed out to do it - because, well, my employer knows that I edit enwp, my friends know that I edit enwp, my *housemate* knows I edit enwp, everything is public, and I'd much rather not have any of them come up to me and start making amused comments about STDs. (This is, of course, a hypothetical example! The things I'm embarrassed about editing are less unsalubrious but a lot weirder...). That's the most common case. It isn't much of a stretch from that to contemplate people who compartmentalise their lives, who are happy to sign their own name to the erudite work on Byzantine history but would really rather prefer not to link that to their lovingly written articles on sexual practices. Not for any dubious or malevolent reasons, just that they'd rather keep some aspects of their life private whilst being open about the others. And when people want to have a reasonably normal and productive editing career in these alternative topics, they're going to create an account and get to it as normal. It doesn't matter what policy says on the matter, this is what will happen, it's inevitable. Maybe they say they edit under a different name on less exotic topics, maybe they don't. Either way, it's *completely harmless to the encyclopedia*; it means a bit of work gets done that wouldn't otherwise get done, and everyone's happier. There's nothing wrong with it, and I can't see any reason to try and "legislate it away". The line that needs to be drawn - as in this case - is whether it's appropriate to do this to compartmentalise engaging in meta-debate; there are reasonable arguments both ways (as Greg is noticing...) but it's pretty clearly a different case to a normal "editing funny stuff account", and we should be very wary of throwing babies out with the bathwater. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk