On Jun 3, 2011, at 6:50 PM, George Herbert wrote:
On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Kirill Lokshin
<kirill.lokshin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 6:41 PM, Dan Rosenthal
<swatjester(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Jun 3, 2011, at 8:29 AM, Scott MacDonald
wrote:
Imagine if poetlister now engages in identity
theft and deception at
Wikiversity.
How precisely does one engage in identity theft in a project that does not
require the submission of identifying information?
By voluntarily submitting stolen information, of course. The fact that
Wikipedia (or Wikiversity) does not require that I provide my real name to
participate would not make it any more acceptable if I were to claim that I
was Dan Rosenthal and put pictures of you on my user page to prove it.
(You'd be correct if the project actually prohibited the submission
of identifying information, rather than merely not requiring it; but that's
not the case here.)
Right. Merely staying pseudonymous or anonymous is supported, but
taking on some other real life person's identity on English Language
Wikipedia is clearly prohibited now, and should be. It's bad for all
the same reasons that real life identity theft is bad.
From:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:USERNAME#Real_names
"Do not register a username that includes the name of an identifiable
living person unless it is your real name."
And arguably the action falls under disruptive editing practices, which are a blockable
offense anyway (wasting administrator time with a bad-faith attempt to disrupt the
project). Except, if you don't know that this is happening, what do you do then? It
seems perfectly reasonable to block under existing policies when the offender is being
obvious and the offense is clear, but what happens when some random anon puts up their own
personal information on their userpage. Are we going to run an inquisition on them to see
if they are who they say they are (I'm not referring to cases where it is obvious or a
cursory investigation would reveal it)? At what point does the threat that a person might
use information gathered from an off-wiki act of identity theft precipitate on-wiki
action? We talk about driving off new editors with scary sockpuppet investigations and
warning templates and such -- this line of discussion to me seems like it may well have a
chilling effect on editors who want to identify themselves in good faith, for whatever
reason.
I'm not nearly familiar enough with the actual history to know if I'm being
helpful with this line of inquiry so if I'm totally off base, please let me know
(actually it was interesting to read the history from David and John's posts, for what
that's worth.)
-Dan