On Jun 3, 2011, at 8:29 AM, Scott MacDonald wrote: How precisely does one engage in identity theft in a project that does not require the submission of identifying information? -Dan

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 6:41 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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.) Kirill

On Jun 3, 2011, at 6:50 PM, George Herbert wrote: 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

I see, I was reading the statement to imply that he/she was somehow using Wikimedia projects as a method of acquiring personally identifiable information, not as a distribution method. -Dan On Jun 3, 2011, at 6:46 PM, Kirill Lokshin wrote:

Kirill Lokshin wrote: Well, I'm certainly not going to miss a chance to link to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog>. If your name turned out to not be "Kirill Lokshin," it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference to me or almost anyone else. What you're describing (broadly) reminds me more of Essjay than Poetlister, though, for what it's worth. I'm not saying that this type of behavior is desirable or acceptable, but getting back to the point (which should be actionable behavior), <http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Poetlister> doesn't seem very inaccurate or deceptive to me in its current form. Put me in the "still failing to see a problem that needs solving" column. If Poetlister is engaging in identity theft, by all means, tell the local authorities. If he's committing any kind of crime, tell them, for that matter. But at the moment, he seems to be updating a Bible bibliography on a free content ... whatever it is that Wikiversity is ("open educational resource"?). Where's the beef? MZMcBride