[WikiEN-l] Bad And Wrong Policy/Procedure/Guideline Hitlist

Fri Nov 3 20:46:28 UTC 2006

On 03/11/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/3/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
> > Please list and elaborate.
> >
> > This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
> > just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
> > awful.
>
>
> Parts of Wikipedia:Username
>
> "Names that can be confused with other contributors" tends to be
> overused. It is common practice on the net for people when a user name
> is taken to use the user name followed by some number. We need to
> accept this.

Random anecdote: some years ago, my then-girlfriend's little sister
got an email address. It was on Hotmail, I think - she took something
like "nickname43" as the username. On being asked - what, was
"nickname" not available? - she told us that she thought *everyone*
had a number at the end of their names on the internet...

> Office Actions:
>
> Not happy with DCMA take down stuff being dealt with through normal
> deletion rather than oversight deletion. I don't like the idea that I
> could accidentally restore stuff deleted due to DMCA notices.

On the other hand, it's very handy to see the page *was* deleted, so
admins can handle queries about it, and if you oversighted all the
revisions this might not be the case.

Would it be simpler just to delete it and say "DMCA takedown" in the
deletion summary? You'd be hard pressed to restore something without
having read the delete log...

...alternately, if we don't want to make the exact details of
"copyright holder used actual legal methods" widely public, but are
happy with explaining things to admins only, it could be worthwhile to
blank the article and write a brief explanation on the newest revision
before deleting the page, then refer to this in the edit summary. If
nothing else, it flags up an immediate problem if you restore the old
version without looking - because you'll have a discussion page not an
article.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk