Hi all, The situation on blocking people for bad usernames seems extremely confused at the moment. According to the official policy (WP:USERNAME), this should not happen:
-- If enough people complain about your user name (through talk pages or the mailing lists or Meta-Wikipedia), the bureaucrats will change it. Neither complaints nor name changes should be arbitrary, but user names that are offensive to a significant number of people will be changed, not without notice, but without appeal.
Co-operative contributors should normally just be made aware of our policy via a post on their talk page. Voluntary changes (via Wikipedia:Changing username) are preferred: users from other countries and/or age groups may make mistakes about choosing names -- immediate blocking or listing on RfC could scare off new users acting in good faith.
Where a change must be forced, we first discuss it. This can take place on either (A) the user's talk page, (B) a subpage of the user's talk page, or (C) a sub page of Wikipedia:Requests for comment. It should be listed on Wikipedia:Requests for comment in the appropriate section. The user should also be made aware of the discussion. --
However the policy claims that username changing is currently disabled, so all of that is moot. Arguably, if you can't change a bad username, then blocking might be permissible? But in any case, [[WP:CHU]] makes no mention of it being disabled.
On the talk page for Wikipedia:Username, there was a straw poll on whether sysops should be able to make snap decisions when policy is clearly breached. It has achieved anything but consensus (roughly 55% in favour).
So what is going on? Why do we keep seeing messages on this list about people being blocked without warning for having mildly provocative usernames?
Steve