[Foundation-l] "Wikidrama" and autonomy of Wikimedia projects

Tue Aug 12 00:03:57 UTC 2008

--- On Mon, 8/11/08, Cary Bass <cary at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> From: Cary Bass <cary at wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] "Wikidrama" and autonomy of Wikimedia projects
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Monday, August 11, 2008, 2:57 PM
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> 
> Scenario 1:
> An active user with an unusual username on the English
> Wikipedia has,
> for whatever reason, never taken advantage of SUL.  An
> account opens up
> on a much project which is, given the name, implausibly
> anything other
> than an impostor of the English Wikipedia account.  It
> does, however,
> have apparently useful contributions (no difficult matter
> on this wiki
> if one is familiar with it); and the local community, while
> believing
> that the account is an impostor account seems to be
> unwilling to resolve
> the situation without demanding that the user come to the
> smaller
> project and ask for usurpation.   Obviously, we
> wouldn't want to force
> the issue with an autonomous project.
> 
> How should this be addressed?
> 
> Does the user have any other option than editing the
> smaller wiki and
> adding the Username Change request, which basically
> subjects the user to
> his/her IP information being revealed to additional
> individuals, not of
> his/her own wiki?

In doing usurpations on en.WS most people create accounts like User:FrankTemp in order to request a usurp of User:Frank.   Very few people actually make a request as an IP, so I don't understand why this is such a dilemma here as most people don't have any trouble to think they can create a quick account to be renamed to the usurp they are requesting.  

On the flipside I am a bit surprised that you would bring a non-problem like this here under such a heading. A single user has an issue while every day usurpations are ongoing regularly.  It would be quick to simply examine how usurps are being done successfully to answer this query. If there were really a perplexing problem here many others would not have figured out how to get their usurps accomplished long before now!

Birgitte SB