[WikiEN-l] Controversial user nicknames

Tue Aug 26 18:37:55 UTC 2003

james duffy wrote:

>> 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. 

The variations on these names are endless.  When you yourself innocently 
used the Gaelic for an Irish man there was the potential for some who 
didn't understand it to find it offensive.  The instances are numerous 
where a perfectly innocent word in one language is grossly offensive, 
but Wikipedia is a polyglottal environment.  I've heard of the late Fr. 
Geoghan but not of Fr. Smyth.  The name, Geoghan, is probably uncommon 
enough for an association with him to be suggested,  [[User:Brendan 
Smyth]] (or Brandon) seems like it could be a sufficiently common name 
that a person could use it without having heard of the pedophile with 
that name.

If we successfully deal with [[User:Adolf Hitler]] someone else can 
start the whole problem with [[User:Adolf Hitler2]], or [[User:Adolf 
Shitler]] who could offend an entirely different range of people

When certain ones of these individuals ge too far out of line, you can 
rest assured that social pressures will be applied by a significant 
portion of the Wikipedia community.

In the absence of specific problems, it strikes me that a lot of 
complicated rules about User names is equivalent to pre-emptively 
feeding trolls.

Ec