On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 18:18, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
What if someone registers an account 'Miscrosoft" and starts vandal editing? The media reports like 'Miscosoft blocked for vandalism in Wikipedia'" would be hardly better than 'Microsoft blocked on sight'.
Concerning the joint accounts I thought the main problem is that someone should be held responsible for the edits. I mean if there are some illegal edits done from this account and then someone claims it is not him, it is another user who uses the same account? On ru.wp we ban the joint accounts on sight, even though the company name policy has not been really enforced.
I support Liam's idea and think we might want to look at a two-tier policy:
1- have "verified" accounts, which are used by some companies/organisation to do "encyclopedic work" 2- disallow using a company's name in one's user name if they have not asked for a verification - and provided the right credentials
This said, I am completely with Lodewijk on the fact that I find incredible that we push companies to actually make what is nothing else than sock puppets accounts, because we don't allow to have a company's name in the user name. I am sure this has been debated at length, but I fail to see how this can be better than being able to identify staff from a company contributing to an article.
Delphine