The Cunctator wrote:
My username makes reference to a Roman general. This
might be offensive
to people who think that I'm advocating militaristic imperialism, or
that I'm critiquing the Roman empire.
Moreover, people have believed that my name is somehow vulgar ("a pun on
dictator").
The standard is not that a name might conceivably be offensive to
*someone* with some fabricated grievance. My own nickname, "Jimbo"
might be perceived by some as a slight against the American south.
But clearly, it is not, since I'm from Alabama and it's actually a
real nickname in the South.
The idea that because there are borderline or difficult cases, we
can't do anything about extreme and obvious cases like "Cumguzzler" or
"CrucifiedChrist" is not persuasive to me.
In the event of borderline cases, we will accomodate as best we can,
making a specific judgment in individual cases as necessary.
Should we ban everyone from using their real names,
too? What if
someone's first name is Dick? Or Jesus? Or Moses? If their last name is
Johnson? Or Matsushitsa? Or Fokker?
An absolute defense to offense is that the name is, in fact, someone's
real name.
There used to be a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville
named, I kid you not, "Fat Ho". Chinese. Engineering prof. Anyhow, if
he shows up on wikipedia, he can use that name. No one else can.
Instead of trying to prescribe usernames, a much
better solution would
be some equivalent of ostracism. For example, allow people to choose on
a case by case basis to see users by userid instead of username.
This is convoluted. Imagine: parents read about wikipedia in the newspaper
and come to check it out, with an eye toward recommending it to their
children as a resource. They click on recent changes and see 'cumguzzler'
and 'throbbing monster cock' and 'pedophilejesusdotcom' (I made that one
up, pretty good, huh?).
Or, imagine: a Nobel Prize winner reads about Wikipedia in the
newspaper and thinks, oooh, if this is a serious project, I'd like to
chip in and work on it, and ask all my Nobel Prize pals to chip in,
too. What a great resource. And again, they see our merry band of
jerks and decide to pass.
To respond to these cases by saying "Oh, but if Milton Friedman doesn't
like those names, he can go into his user preferences and block them on a
case by case basis, or choose to view numbers instead" is pretty weak,
I think.
--Jimbo