[WikiEN-l] unbanned name

[Oliver Pereira]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> If by "no further problems" you mean to say "the person made several 
> attempts to use similar usernames, such as the same thing with different 
> capitalization, ended up with their ip banned for a while, and never 
> came back under the officially sanctioned or any other recognizable 
> sanitized nick", then your recollection is correct.

Oh yes, that's what I meant to say! ;)

Sorry, I can't have been paying enough attention to what was going on.
Since the name that was offending people disappeared (and I didn't see any
of the variants you mention), I just assumed everything was sorted out.

However, I still think that reverting someone's edits for any reason other
than the quality of the edits themselves is counter-productive. Couldn't
there be a list of offensive user names in the system somewhere, and a
mechanism to prevent people from signing in under these names? That way,
any user who makes valuable contributions can still do so anonymously, or
they can get a new name that isn't on the disallowed list, and everyone's
happy(ish)!

I know nothing of the mechanics of these things, but could the
aforementioned list be the page [[Wikipedia:List of offensive usernames]]
itself? That way, whenever someone is offended by a name, they can just
add it to that page, and no banning or further intervention by the
developers would be needed. The page would probably need to be protected,
to prevent people from removing their own usernames, and the rule would be
that people's usernames would only be added when there was a consensus to
do so. Could that be done?

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+