[Foundation-l] SUL pilot and renaming issues

[Robert Rohde]

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 9:06 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hoi,
> The number of edits of an account has been a consideration in that the one
> with the biggest numbers can have the price. With 6000 edits a user can be
> found with less edits then a user from another project. By giving
> precedence
> to admins of projects a new ballgame may exist. There are many people in
> this group who are active in MANY wikis and when you combine their number
> of
> edits, you may find really high numbers.
>
> I do not think that usurpation policies should be determined by individual
> projects. There are too many of them, some 700, and consequently things
> would break down.
> Thanks,
>     GerardM



The principle behind enwiki's policy is still reasonable though.

Attribution is a fundemental legal expectation under the GFDL.  We attribute
edits under our self-chosen psuedonyms.  I'm not convinced that
involuntarily renaming accounts that have an established edit history is
either ethical or legal.

I know the SUL proposal has been to give the account to the most established
user, but it's not clear to me that doing so is appropriate.  An unfortunate
consequence of that is that some popular names might never be unified, but
personally, I'm inclined to think that the only way to be fair to some
existing users may well be to frustrate others.

-Robert Rohde