We shouldn't confuse two overlapping issues here, role accounts and promotional usernames. Neither are allowed in Wikipedia, but the objections are different.

As for the comparison between IP accounts and registered accounts, yes there is an anomaly which would matter if the reason for not allowing role accounts was concern over copyright. But the concerns over trust are different and apply quite strongly. I'm pretty sure we don't whitelist IP accounts for Huggle, we certainly don't give IP editors admin and other additional userrights. The reason why we don't do that is that however good the edits of the person or persons who have been editing from that IP the future edits could come from someone altogether different.

I rather doubt that either Newpage patrol or recent changes patrol could function without an effective whitelisting system of people who we've learned make trustworthy edits. So the ban on role accounts is needed for the smooth running of the project.

As for promotional usernames maybe even the softblock option is too harsh, but there is a practical issue here, we are short of admins and blocking is much quicker than having a quiet word. Perhaps what we need to do is unbundle rename newbie to all admins, and give them the option of renaming promotionally named accounts with fewer than 100 edits. I would hope that a message such as "Hi and welcome to Wikipedia! I think that Fred from PimlicoMuseum might be a promotional username, so I've renamed your account to "Fred P" if you are unhappy with your new name please file a request here and we can change it again - though we don't want to change it to anything that includes the name of an organisation."

WSC

On 29 April 2012 14:12, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 2:40 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com> wrote:
On 29 April 2012 02:32, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does that make sense though? With an account called "Starwarrior", say,
> there is no way of knowing who made the edit either.

Sure, you do. It's not the name on the person's birth certificate, but
it's still a name. It tells you about as much as "John Smith" would.
You can hold that account holder responsible for their actions. With a
role account, they can just say it wasn't them.


With respect, this doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Please consider:

1. We allow IP editing. One IP may be shared by thousands of people. Any one of them can "say it wasn't them". If we are so careless about one half of edits made to Wikipedia, does it make sense to be so stringent about the other half?

2. Even where we have an account name like John Smith and know the account's IP address, it is not trivial to move from that knowledge to identifying the person – especially if the IP address is a proxy, a dynamic IP, or an Internet café in Calcutta. How does having an account name like John Smith help there?

3. It's happened before that several people have shared an account. I can recall a desysop over account sharing. We have no control over that, regardless of what the account name is. 

Compared to that, identifying the person editing Wikipedia at Monmouth Museum is a cinch. Especially if User:MonmouthMuseumWales says on her user page, "This account is operated by Roisin Curran, the Wikipedian in residence at Monmouth Museum." 

Surely, that would give us as much transparency as we could ever want? In fact, rather more transparency than we have for all our pseudonymous users?

I am not saying we should allow role accounts. I am just not convinced by the arguments brought forward here. 

And I do think that the present admin practice of blocking role accounts on sight is unfriendly and should stop. I was instrumental in getting Xeno to change [[WP:UAAI]] in February 2011 to say that accounts using organisation names should *not* be blocked on sight if they edit productively, but that admins should *talk* to people first. 

So it's very disappointing to see that this still goes on, especially if the person at the receiving end is someone on a project like Monmouthpedia. Wikipedia is shooting itself in the foot.

Andreas

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