Anthere wrote:
--- "Michael R. Irwin" mri_icboise@surfbest.net wrote:
Anthere wrote:
<snip good discussion>
We could put tmc in the offensive xx category ?
:-)))
This would presumably censor his home page.
The issue of his signature scattered through random talk pages, the recent log, other meta pages and mailing lists would remain.
Hello Michaël
If user names were to be censored, and in particular tmc one
- recent changes will only last a couple of days
I am uncertain what you mean here unless you are saying tmc would be censored from the recent changes by correctly selecting the filter criteria. Excellent!
- maybe some technical magic can take care of
converting his full name in tmc in talk pages and such ?
IMO Poor approach. It creates more work for the developers than for a random nit wit. This would leave us vulnerable to standard Denial of Service tactics and possibly exhaust our limited developer resources to the detriment of the project.
- mailing lists and meta pages may have no reason of
being censored. It seems that most offended by X issues are concerned by kids looking at the questionable names. Mailing list and meta are for building teams, not encyclopedic articles. So, not supposed to be read by kids.
This presumes that the only value minors can extract from the Wikipedia site or community is the NPOV articles.
Personally I see no reason that civilized community standards can not be achieved such that minors can participate fully to the extent of their ability. Participating with adult teams and politely yielding to superior knowledge or phrasing would be beneficial (educational for minor, available effort for the team) and is within the skills of most children if consistently predominantly presented examples worthy of emulation.
At the moment I suspect minors would tend to diverge frequently from civilized behavior along with the rest of us. Some adults attempting to pull seniority on misbehaving or impolite minors while ignoring other adults would probably merely accelerate the divergence.
As a result, this is probably a discussion for either:
1. Later. After a means of establishing, documenting and fairly enforcing community standards is available as per Mav and Ed suggestions.
2. Another site with broader educational goals than spoon feeding allegedly authoritative NPOV material to users for non critical consumption or resuse.
I agree that currently minors should probably not be participating here.
However, full participation of minors would provide an educational benefit to them (and others) which may out weigh the value of the actual encyclopedia data ingested here. Team building and participation skills are at an increasing premium in the modern workplace.
Perhaps we are merely a free encyclopedia project and not an educational process or opportunity. If this is the case then I think we are wasting a lot of economic potential and actually slowing down the improvement of our processes and our material.
As Axel has pointed out elsewhere, more crap is not what our quality goals should be about if we are serious about providing even just a free encyclopedia.
- if user can express their political pov on their
user page, their is no reason why they could not express other type of pov.
I agree but I think I am missing your point. If you mean that there is no reason that "tmc" should be deleted as an account name if it can be filtered I am wishy washy. I think it is fine for his personal page. If someone is offended by his page they can leave and easily stay away. Currently the account name is spread throughout Wikipedia anytime he used a signature, thus difficult to avoid. That seems to me to be a problem.
Moving away from sex for a change:
Does the debate change if someone moves on to account names such as:
"Einstein was an idiot because e=cm^2"
(factual distortion from e=mc^2 while diverting the victim with an opinion "Einstein was an idiot")
or
"VANDALISM IN PROGRESS" (potentially disruptive to other editors if they stop to go check only to find it was a diversion)
or
"Kill all Lawyers" (offensive to some, and we need experts in law)
or something similarly disruptive to our purpose of providing NPOV material, a pleasant educational environment, an effective review log, etc.?
Regards, Mike Irwin