[WikiEN-l] Controversial user nicknames

Tue Aug 26 12:03:45 UTC 2003

>Ec wrote
>There are likely some who feel offended by it, but that is the personal 
>choice of the humourless.

It is not merely a case of having no sense of humour if you are someone of 
Kurdish descent and you find a contributor editing an article on the Kurds 
'humously' using the name of the man who committed genocide against the 
Kurds. Nor is it a matter of a sense of humour if a contributor to an 
article on the Jewish holocaust called himself after a leading nazi, with 
the edit history listing a line of edits by Adolf Hitler.  Or if someone as 
a joke decided that all their edits to articles on child sex abuse use the 
name of some notorious paedophile like Fr. Geoghan or Fr. Brendan Smyth.

We already have had users posing as Palestinian militants, as Stalinists, as 
extreme militarist Americans, etc. We have had tactless and provocative 
names used. It isn't a case of 'humourless' people taking offence. It is the 
real danger that users may be put off wiki if they come on and find 
distasteful, deliberately offensive names being used. 98% of names used as 
inoffensive, It makes sense to plan now to ensure a small body of users 
aren't used, rather than leaving it until damage has been done, offence 
caused and people turned away before we deal with problem. (We have already 
had one user, a multiple banned user, who came on any 'posed' as a 
paedophile, asking if we had any 'nice' pictures of children to download. 
Obviously he wasn't a real paedophile: if he was, he couldn't have drawn 
attention to himself, just taken any images we had. It was part of that sick 
user's game of trying to cause offence.)

JT

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