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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by JohnCD (talk | contribs) at 20:04, 30 November 2013 (→shared accounts vs. shared IP addresses: add). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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• WT:UPOL

The project page associated with this talk page is an official policy on Misplaced Pages. Policies have wide acceptance among editors and are considered a standard for all users to follow. Please review policy editing recommendations before making any substantive change to this page. Always remember to keep cool when editing, and don't panic.

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shared accounts vs. shared IP addresses

A shared account is forbidden; a {{Shared IP}} may receive a template encouraging continued editing. An old revision of the policy says the prohibition is "for reasons of attribution and accountability", yet in the example given, "Secretary of the XY Foundation", the changes could reasonably be attributed to the XY Foundation as the work of its employee. When someone edits from a shared IP address, it's likely to be impractical to discover the person's identity. When someone makes a pseudonymous account (such as mine) it's at best inconvenient. The policy seems counter to its formerly stated purpose, and currently has no stated purpose.

The editor from Creative Concrete Products, LLC (talk · contribs) wanted to disclose a conflict of interest, but got taken to a noticeboard after a single "getting started" edit; the lengthy discussion must have consumed a great deal of other contributors' time. Someone from Suburban Express also tried to disclose a COI but ran afoul of the policy, attracting blocks for editing as Suburban express (talk · contribs) and Suburban Express President (talk · contribs). Another example is Whiopower (talk · contribs), whose connection to Genesis Energy Limited is less apparent under the new username.

This part of the policy seems like it may be doing more harm than good. Am I missing something? —rybec 04:06, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

The solution is to encourage such users to change to a username of the form "Mark at WidgetsUSA" or "Jack Smith at the XY Foundation"; these are explicitly permitted (see WP:ISU), though not everyone knows it, and they make a clear, and desirable, declaration of interest while also making clear that this is an individual and not a shared account. If a colleague also wishes to edit, he can be "Bill at WidgetsUSA", maintaining individual responsibility for edits. They should of course also be invited to read WP:PSCOI.

If IP editing is allowed at all, it is impossible to forbid shared IP use. JohnCD (talk) 20:04, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Name syntax policy

There have been some confusing user names since full Unicode support was implemented. I suggest requiring that Misplaced Pages user names be required to meet the IDNA 2008 criteria for domain names, with the addition of single spaces. IDNA 2008 is a collection of technical rules designed to prevent the abuse of Unicode to create two strings that look the same but are different. Code is available to enforce these rules. Basically, this means you can't mix certain characters in the same name, you can't mix left-to-right and right-to-left scripts, and certain homoglyphs are prohibited. Any name that fails these tests is doing something really weird with Unicode, and is probably not typable from its visible form. --John Nagle (talk) 05:25, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Not sure where else to post this...

... but someone might want to check this account's edits and username. Sorry if this is the wrong platform for this comment. Thanks, --Another Believer _(Talk) 22:36, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Reported EEng (talk) 00:07, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Gibberish

So I noticed a few things in the archive about gibberish names but I wanted to clarify before I notify the user for possibly breaking the username policy. Does Misplaced Pages allow gibberish names? Thanks in advance. Jns4eva (talk) 03:06, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

In general, if it's made out of letters and numbers, and not confusingly similar to something else, gibberish usernames are allowed. Policy on characters difficult to type on most keyboards is still undecided. That said, gibberish usernames may indicate mechanically generated spam accounts, so they can be regarded as initially suspicious. See for a classic case of this. --John Nagle (talk) 07:38, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the help and for the reference! I wasn't sure if this fell into the list of "distracting" usernames or not but for future reference I'll assume good faith until I notice a bad edit. Thanks again! Jns4eva (talk) 02:17, 12 November 2013 (UTC)