One thing to keep in mind is that there are a couple of million Wikimedia
accounts. Just by the law of averages, it's likely that someone who has a
Wikimedia account dies every day. Most of the time, we will never know
about it. I'd guess that a good percentage of the accounts that have been
inactive for 5-10-15 years belong to people who have passed away. The vast
majority of accounts of deceased editors have no potentially hazardous
permissions attached to them - there aren't *that* many administrators,
interface administrators, checkusers and oversighters across all projects -
so there is no significant risk in leaving those accounts active. There is
no real security issue here. The main effect of having a "deceased user"
right would be to highlight which users were popular enough to have their
death noticed by their community; most accounts of deceased users will
never be identified as such.
I've explained the "process" of how we address things on English Wikipedia,
but not even we have a formal written policy on this; as best I can tell,
most of the steps I've mentioned aren't written down anywhere, and it is
simply a practice that has developed over time and is passed from one
"generation" to another by example and word of mouth. In fact, I'd guess
that very small projects (where almost all the editors know each other) are
even better at recognizing the contributions of deceased members than any
of the big projects. I'm in favour of individual projects, which all have
slightly different cultures, developing their own process, but I'd suggest
it be a guideline rather than a policy.
Risker/Anne
On Tue, 9 Nov 2021 at 10:19, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l <
wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
That would enter the domain of naming guidelines and
we don't have those
in general. Again, I have been pointing out since the first years of SUL.
For example a string can look terrible in one language but not another,
you have a normal user experience in one Wikipedia, and than you realize
that you were blocked after the first edit in another one. If we don't fix
something like this first, which is a first-order problem on the issue of
naming guideline, it would be very difficult to add anything else, IMHO.
Alessandro
Il martedì 9 novembre 2021, 16:05:41 CET, Željko Blaće <zblace(a)mi2.hr> ha
scritto:
Maybe a good approach would be also to have a global rename of the user
account to add something like _(.) so it is systematic and 'obvious' across
all Wikimedia projects - no?
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