Ec wrote There are likely some who feel offended by it, but that is the personal choice of the humourless.
It is not merely a case of having no sense of humour if you are someone of Kurdish descent and you find a contributor editing an article on the Kurds 'humously' using the name of the man who committed genocide against the Kurds. Nor is it a matter of a sense of humour if a contributor to an article on the Jewish holocaust called himself after a leading nazi, with the edit history listing a line of edits by Adolf Hitler. Or if someone as a joke decided that all their edits to articles on child sex abuse use the name of some notorious paedophile like Fr. Geoghan or Fr. Brendan Smyth.
We already have had users posing as Palestinian militants, as Stalinists, as extreme militarist Americans, etc. We have had tactless and provocative names used. It isn't a case of 'humourless' people taking offence. It is the real danger that users may be put off wiki if they come on and find distasteful, deliberately offensive names being used. 98% of names used as inoffensive, It makes sense to plan now to ensure a small body of users aren't used, rather than leaving it until damage has been done, offence caused and people turned away before we deal with problem. (We have already had one user, a multiple banned user, who came on any 'posed' as a paedophile, asking if we had any 'nice' pictures of children to download. Obviously he wasn't a real paedophile: if he was, he couldn't have drawn attention to himself, just taken any images we had. It was part of that sick user's game of trying to cause offence.)
JT
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Ec wrote There are likely some who feel offended by it, but that is the personal choice of the humourless.
It is not merely a case of having no sense of humour if you are someone of Kurdish descent and you find a contributor editing an article on the Kurds 'humously' using the name of the man who committed genocide against the Kurds. Nor is it a matter of a sense of humour if a contributor to an article on the Jewish holocaust called himself after a leading nazi, with the edit history listing a line of edits by Adolf Hitler. Or if someone as a joke decided that all their edits to articles on child sex abuse use the name of some notorious paedophile like Fr. Geoghan or Fr. Brendan Smyth.
A collegue of mine is named Moamer Qazafi -- which may not look controversial at first glance, but it is simply another way to transliterate the name of the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Would you ban him simply because his name has an unfortunate and not particularly humorous similarity to that of a tyrant?
Sean Barrett wrote:
A collegue of mine is named Moamer Qazafi -- which may not look controversial at first glance, but it is simply another way to transliterate the name of the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Would you ban him simply because his name has an unfortunate and not particularly humorous similarity to that of a tyrant?
Notice that the proposal didn't say anything about banning anyone. It's just a set of recommendations. Certainly, a valid response to a complaint about a possibly problematic name is that it just happens, unfortunately, to be one's actual real legal name.
--Jimbo
Sean Barrett wrote:
A collegue of mine is named Moamer Qazafi -- which may not look controversial at first glance, but it is simply another way to transliterate the name of the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Would you ban him simply because his name has an unfortunate and not particularly humorous similarity to that of a tyrant?
Transliteration problem merely permute the opportunities for mischief as in Usama or Osama, bin or ben, Ladin or Laden. That alone gives us 8 possible names.
Ec
james duffy wrote:
Ec wrote There are likely some who feel offended by it, but that is the personal choice of the humourless.
It is not merely a case of having no sense of humour if you are someone of Kurdish descent and you find a contributor editing an article on the Kurds 'humously' using the name of the man who committed genocide against the Kurds. Nor is it a matter of a sense of humour if a contributor to an article on the Jewish holocaust called himself after a leading nazi, with the edit history listing a line of edits by Adolf Hitler. Or if someone as a joke decided that all their edits to articles on child sex abuse use the name of some notorious paedophile like Fr. Geoghan or Fr. Brendan Smyth.
The variations on these names are endless. When you yourself innocently used the Gaelic for an Irish man there was the potential for some who didn't understand it to find it offensive. The instances are numerous where a perfectly innocent word in one language is grossly offensive, but Wikipedia is a polyglottal environment. I've heard of the late Fr. Geoghan but not of Fr. Smyth. The name, Geoghan, is probably uncommon enough for an association with him to be suggested, [[User:Brendan Smyth]] (or Brandon) seems like it could be a sufficiently common name that a person could use it without having heard of the pedophile with that name.
If we successfully deal with [[User:Adolf Hitler]] someone else can start the whole problem with [[User:Adolf Hitler2]], or [[User:Adolf Shitler]] who could offend an entirely different range of people
When certain ones of these individuals ge too far out of line, you can rest assured that social pressures will be applied by a significant portion of the Wikipedia community.
In the absence of specific problems, it strikes me that a lot of complicated rules about User names is equivalent to pre-emptively feeding trolls.
Ec