[WikiEN-l] Controversial user nicknames

Wed Aug 27 19:26:56 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
>

That is an /extremely/ interesting point which pretty much shows that 
dealing with issue is a necessity.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail