There's no reason why existing users can't be grandfathered in, and also no reason why people can't use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. I don't think it's so unfair to new users that it should prevent us from using this as a solution.
At any rate, since this is clearly an unpopular solution, perhaps it's not worth fighting it out.
Alternatively, perhaps we should make strong recommendations on what kind of usernames are acceptable, succinctly stated when creating a new login. (E.g., "Please choose a username that you do not think will offend people, or else members of the community may require you to change it.") This will cut out those people who create what may be an offensive username without intending to offend, but then get self-righteous about it when told they must change it, and thus clearly delineate who is a collosal jerk.
If this, also, seems crazy or ineffective, fine. But we should figure out some way to highlight who is choosing names because they want to make a statement or simply piss people off, and who is choosing names just because they don't know any better or are trying to be funny. And we should figure out some process of urging them to change it (cf. Votes for Deletion or VANDALISM IN PROGRESS), rather than thrashing it out here for a week every time.
Saurabh
------ Living in this country will always be hell until people stop demanding that the state imprison their neighbors.
In message <8elLGTGSpVB@erik_moeller>, Erik Moeller said:
If this is going to become such an issue, might I propose that, to avoid debate in the future, we switch to UseRealNames (e.g., your handle is FirstnameLastname, or FMLastname)?
Not practical. We have made the choice, have thousands of registered users, can't switch now. Requiring this from new users only would be unfair towards existing ones and create lots of conflicts. Besides, you can bet there's plenty of people in our userbase right now who would be fiercely opposed to such a policy.
Regards,
Erik _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l