Tony Sidaway wrote:
While I sympathise with your feelings, I don't see the problem here. You signed up with Wikipedia and someone copies your signup information on a copy of Wikipedia. So what?
It's a real issue, especially with the search & replace the Nazipedia did. Say I had the following text on my userpage:
I have been an administrator on Wikipedia since 2003.
On the Nazipedia, it would say:
I have been an administrator on Nazipedia since 2003.
(I'm aware that's not actually what they named it, but I don't recall what they called it.)
I contribute to Wikipedia under my real name, with my city of residence and certain current volunteer positions I hold listed.
If someone Googled me, they'd see an entry that made it look like I was an active contributor - an administrator, which many people not familiar with Wikipedia might assume meant a site founder/high-ranking person - to a Nazi project and proud of it.
Next thing you know, it'd be "political party officer secretly Nazi activist" on the news. Now, I'd have a legitimate claim of defamation and/or libel against someone, but I'd rather not go through all the work entailed in suing someone for it after the fact, and I shouldn't have to hide who I am on Wikipedia to prevent it.
The primary Wikipedia data dump for setting up mirror sites should not contain User: or User_talk: namespace pages, and ideally not Wikipedia: or any of the various Talk: namespaces. Usernames in page histories could be changed, say, to "Wikipedia" or "Wikipedian #000110" or something similar.
In some ways, this would be very handy for some other Wikis, who want the article content and such, but would see all the rest as random cruft they'd have to slog through deleting. How many downstream users want 5 zillion AFD history entries clogging up their DB?
The User:, Wikipedia:, and *_talk: namespaces could go in a second dump for actual Wikipedia backups, theoretically... in practice I see two dumps being an icky amount of work, of course.
(Sidenote: some people have a template they put on their userpages, about how this is a Wikipedia user page, if you see it anywhere else, it's not valid, etc... problem is, that's subject to the same search & replace as anything else with "Wikipedia" in it, and furthermore, most people don't subst: the template, meaning that if the downstreamer just deletes or changes that template, it goes away...)
-- Jake Nelson