To remove information from the Wikipedia because of who contributed it, rather than because of the nature of the information itself, would be to cut off one's nose to spite one's face. I haven't been paying much attention to this person's edits, but other people have stated on the person's User talk page that they have made useful contributions. If I recall the earlier case of Throbbing Monster Cock correctly, a developer just changed his name to "TMC", and there were no further problems. Couldn't the same thing be done again? Oliver +-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Brion Vibber wrote: Oh yes, that's what I meant to say! ;) Sorry, I can't have been paying enough attention to what was going on. Since the name that was offending people disappeared (and I didn't see any of the variants you mention), I just assumed everything was sorted out. However, I still think that reverting someone's edits for any reason other than the quality of the edits themselves is counter-productive. Couldn't there be a list of offensive user names in the system somewhere, and a mechanism to prevent people from signing in under these names? That way, any user who makes valuable contributions can still do so anonymously, or they can get a new name that isn't on the disallowed list, and everyone's happy(ish)! I know nothing of the mechanics of these things, but could the aforementioned list be the page [[Wikipedia:List of offensive usernames]] itself? That way, whenever someone is offended by a name, they can just add it to that page, and no banning or further intervention by the developers would be needed. The page would probably need to be protected, to prevent people from removing their own usernames, and the rule would be that people's usernames would only be added when there was a consensus to do so. Could that be done? Oliver +-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+

take a look at this page: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%E9gion_d%27honneur In what way is the article name different from the redirect? All I can see is that one has a "smart quote"-style apostrophe. but the URL of the redirect page seems the same: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=L%E9gion_d%27honneur&redire… have I missed something obvious? L%E9gion_d%27honneur -- article L%E9gion_d%27honneur -- redirect

On ĵaŭ, 2003-01-16 at 16:02, Lee Pilich wrote: Ugh. I've renamed it to use the regular apostrophe instead of a high control character which happens to be in the same place as a curly single quote in Microsoft's almost, but not quite, standard character set. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Erik Moeller wrote: Brion did think that, and he was right. But yesterday I said that there's no need to ask me first. Let me know when something like this is done, so I don't miss it, and let me know *before* if there's some question about it being borderline. Yes. I curse like a sailor myself in appropriate contexts. Foul language doesn't bother me. But wikipedia is not an appropriate context. There's a danger of a person or group of people deciding to get their jollies by fighting us about this. Yes, that would be stupid. But some people have too much time on their hands. --Jimbo

Oliver Pereira wrote: Usually, yes, I think you're right. Well, such a list will always be incomplete. And pattern matching will lead to funny results. So automating the determination of what's offensive is not likely to be very effective. "ThrobbingMonsterCock" -- hmm, we might ban 'Cock'. But what about someone named "Cockburn"? I've basically declared open season on these things, so there's not going to need to be a lot of mailing list discussion about them, except when something odd happens, as is bound to be the case sooner or later. --Jimbo

The total number of users is probably in the area of 600-700 million (http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/), and many of them just do e-mail. I don't know how many of these are nice people. SCNR On topic: The more we make a big deal out of our nickname policy, the more people will try to make a point out of disagreeing with us. We don't really need long winded explanations, we just need to apply it swiftly. It would help if you would give Brion the endorsement to act on his own best judgment in these cases (unless you have already done so and I missed it), until we have a more convenient interface to make these changes. Of course, voting would be even better :-) :-) :-) Regards Erik