[WikiEN-l] Controversial user nicknames

Wed Aug 27 16:48:59 UTC 2003

Any user name is a copyright pseudonym if it is not a real user's name.
The user name (or IP address) is the only way to trace the attribution
rights
(this is especially inportant in droit d'auteur countries such as Canada
where
an author's moral rights must be respected, and if someone has questions
about the validity of the copyright of the underlying text submitted to
Wikipedia the only way to check that is to contact the contributor from
Wikipedia (they usually call that 'due diligence' in the copyright chain of
title
review industry).

The  GFDL requires that the last five authors of a document released be
listed
(see section 4(B) of the license).  Thus,  five contributors to a page may
technically have to be listed by any GFDL republisher of that page.

Imagine someone who wants to publish a page and finds that one of the
authors has an offensive name; they may decide that they cannot morally
accept to use such a page because of the offensive character of the author's
name which they must acknowledge.

 If there is an offense username, a controversial name, or one which
involves
 profanity, then this would tend to discourage the redistribution of
Wikipedia
 content. Thus IMHO using an offensive user name is in violation of the
spirit of the licensing scheme that we use in order to encourage
redistribution
 of our work. That  should be enough reason to prohibit the use of such
names.

Alex756

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vicki Rosenzweig" <vr at redbird.org>

> There's another problem with "use real names." I'm using mine. If the
other
> Vicki Rosenzweig I'm aware of wants to participate in Wikipedia, I doubt
> either of us would think it a good idea for her to edit as "Vicki
> Rosenzweig 2".
>
> And that's with an unusual name: there are a *lot* of "John Smith"s out
there.