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Section 7.1 Deleting and merging accounts has nothing whatsoever about merging accounts. Keith ( talk) 03:37, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
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"It is recommended that contributors not use multiple accounts without good reason."
Less wordy = "Using multiple accounts without a good reason is not recommended."
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.242.88.25 ( talk) 11:01, 13 July 2018 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 July 15#Template:UAA-no edits. Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:01, 15 July 2018 (UTC)
Can someone either point me to the WMF legal policy requiring accounts to be associated with an individual and not a group, or explain to me what is the rationale behind forbidding shared accounts? I thought it was a requirement per the ToU but I cannot see it anywhere in wmf:Terms_of_Use/en#Our_Terms_of_Use.
(Note that I am talking about names that violate WP:ISU but not WP:ORGNAME, e.g. User:FriendsFromFlorida.) Tigraan Click here to contact me 07:41, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
We do additionally have (potentially legal) problems when a user claims to represent an organisation (...)I would consider that to be better dealt by ORGNAME; the rationale is not "you should not use an account for multiple people" but "you should not have an 'official account'". User:BigCorpOfficial is problematic, but in the same way that User:BigCorpSpokespersonJeff is problematic, while User:SomeGalsAtBigCorp is not (in my view).
If I recall correctly we simply want one person to be held responsible for all of one account's actions.I can understand that as two sub-arguments, either of which I find unconvincing:
You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license, so anonymous editors do not get to complain that only the IP was attributed; I do not see why that should be different for shared accounts. The CC-BY legalese is incomprehensible to me, but the CC wiki says authors may waive attribution altogether; I do not think plausible that one could waive attribution entirely by not providing authorship info, yet make a text unusable because the authorship info does not unequivocally identify a single person. (Notice that "I do not think plausible that..." is not the same as "It is impossible").
Given the slew of false reports to UAA recently, I propose adding options to the response template that indicate that people should use another noticeboard. I created Template:UAA/sandbox for that purpose with four different new notices. I also removed the "csd" and "ep" options as a failed to see how they are relevant to UAA. Feedback? Regards So Why 09:49, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
There appears to be some confusion about the purpose of the "confusing usernames" parts of policy. That exists to protect the project from people who create a username that can other users might mistake for an official account, or for a bot account, or it's too similar to another username. It doesn't exist to allow you to ban names that you don't understand. Someone can create the name sjacjloufniw. You don't understand it, it confuses you, but it's not confusable with another account. Another user couldn't then create sjacj1oufniw, because that risks being confused with sjacjloufniw. DanBCDanBC ( talk) 12:20, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
So, since as they say policies should reflect practice, not dictate it, should language be added to the policy regarding the established practice of blocking ORGNAMEs that have made even one edit that signals a violation? Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:06, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
This guy — Preceding unsigned comment added by Braden1127 ( talk • contribs) 15:37, 1 September 2018 (UTC)
See (noping'ed): I am not black ( talk · contribs). Concerned about possible violation of WP:DISRUPTNAME bullet one, but seems to be an edge case, if it's a case at all. Only one edit so far; an inoffensive edit at Arabic (which I reverted per MOS). Can't decide whether to add {{ uw-username}} to their Talk page. Then again, maybe not worry about it unless they edit again, per last three comments under No at this 2014 Rfc? Mathglot ( talk) 04:51, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
I just kinda IAR’ed and did this, but maybe we should discuss it?
I've recently been removing obvious non-violations from Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention/Bot, per #9 of the instructions saying Obvious false positives reported by DeltaQuadBot and DatBot may be removed.; however, the page itself is in the admin backlog. Haven't found anything else determining whether or not #9 is an instruction for admins only, and therefore I should not edit it, or not. Checking page history, only bots and admins have edited it recently. Is there some instructions regarding if it is admin only that I have missed, or am I allowed to edit? Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 01:07, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
I like.-- Dlohcierekim ( talk) 13:05, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
Traditionally, we have handled reports on users with mild violations and no edits by placing them in the holding pen. After sitting there for a week or two these reports are reviewed again to see if they have edited in the meantime. This strikes me as needless busywork and I would suggest we change the procedure so that adding the “wait” response to a report is considered declining the report and it is simply removed a while later like other declined reports, leaving only “being discussed with user” and “keep monitoring” as the only reports that go to holding. Having reviewed hundreds if not thousands of such reports I feel the risk is fairly low, usually if they don’t edit the day the create the account they don’t edit at all. In the rare cases where they do edit, they can be re-reported at UAA and blocked. Beeblebrox ( talk) 18:09, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
After making my last remark I really started considering what goes on there and questioning if we should be doing this at all. The most common scenarios are:
I would guesstimate that only about 5% of HP reports lead to subsequent admin action. Is that enough to justify continuing to do this? Beeblebrox ( talk) 19:11, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
I propose adding to WP:Username policy#Promotional names, a third bullet point:
{{ uw-memorialblock}} has been nominated for deletion; see discussion. Galobtter ( pingó mió) 10:49, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
It is currently not clear in the policy how we handle case sensitivity.
On one hand the policy states usernames are case sensitive (with no elaboration).
On another, the policy states (in a completely different section: "Similar usernames") that "Usernames that are very similar to existing ones cannot be registered normally".
What this tells me is that important rules regarding user names are not covered by this policy. Instead this seems to be freely up to some programmer.
It also feels fairly incomprehensible to the regular user to use this policy to answer "can I log in as capnzapp?" or "can I register Capnzapp?". (I'm CapnZapp, btw, with a capital Z)
How can I answer these questions from the policy? (Without making an attempt at actual login/registration)
That I'm blocked by some software and thus that the issue is moot in practice (the answers are no and no, I tried) mostly feels like a convenient "programmer's rule". I would say the regular user simply cannot use this policy document to understand the actual rules that govern the subject of the article! It seems like the programmers can change the rules at any time with zero oversight or feedback from here. Isn't that a problem for you?
CapnZapp ( talk) 08:37, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
PS. I found exactly one talk section in the archives on this topic, but it was nine years old. DS.
Let me rephrase since some editors state they don't understand what I identify as lacking in the current article.
How can I answer the following questions from the policy?
Without making an attempt at actual login/registration, that is.
Please explain, step by step, how you envision a regular non-technical reader to achieve clarity here. Or to be honest I'd rather you don't, since my aim isn't to force anyone to go into defensive stance. My aim is to explain how this page fails to explain its basic tenets in a way that is comprehensible to the non-specialist reader. So I'd much rather you improve the article than reply to me :-) CapnZapp ( talk) 10:43, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
Wikipedia usernames are case sensitive, but the first letter is always automatically capitalized.( source)
The software will not allow you to register with a username that is already in use, or one that appears too similar to one that is already in use.(same source)
Morning all, I have noticed that User:HBC AIV helperbot5 makes lots of edits very close together. For the purpose of reducing unnecessary logging of actions, would it not be best to have it check every 90s or so and make all changes in one go rather than making 5 edits immediately after each other. RhinosF1 (chat) (status) (contribs) 07:34, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
So I've encountered a user that matched the username of (and has also edited) Ricardo Milos, but at the moment, the page is up for deletion. I have reverted one of their edits because the sources they used fell under WP:UGC, but the user reverted me back. I am unsure as to whether the user can be reported to this venue as a blatant violation anyway, despite the AfD. If you reply here, please ping me by adding {{u|JalenFolf}} to your message, and signing it . Jalen D. Folf (talk) 05:51, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I dont know if this username qualifies as posing "blatant and serious problems that they need to be immediately blocked." But the name and the associated images seems very offensive, even if it is not intended to be so. Check out User:A loose noose. Comments?-- Smokefoot ( talk) 17:48, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Such as 2600:1003:B85D:2583:7584:4EFE:D204:3CEE. There seem to be a lot of these about, they pop up and they mostly seem to only get used about once for some controversial borderline-disruptive editing. What's the story with them and why can't they be blocked or otherwise stopped? 2.24.71.30 ( talk) 20:23, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
User:Stanglavine and I are currently at loggerheads (that's probably a tad strong a term; we disagree!) over whether or not the name of a company plus its year of establishment - such as WidgetsUSA2009, for example - constitutes a valid username under WP:CORPNAME (see User_talk:Stanglavine#Rename_concern for the specifics). I'm bringing the discussion over here to get a few more opinions: is this type of username suitable to identify a single individual (which would make it acceptable under the policy), or does it still represent a company (which would make it an unsuitable username)? Any thoughts? Yunshui 雲 水 21:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
There is no obvious interpretation of the word confusing, and policy is extremely vague.
It should be explained what confusing means. Does confusing mean usernames which are misleading as to their meaning? Names that can not be read by a human? Names with similar characters to look like other names?
To remedy this, I suggest:
As I raised here, I propose SQLbot (or similar) to auto-remove stale reports as it does already for AIV. This would help alleviate or perhaps prevent backlogs where old items (perhaps there for 5-6 hours) have been skilled by patrolling admins or that have otherwise been marked with one of the UAA templates. Although I propose for the entire forum, the bot reported usernames section in particular tends to get very long at times where non-issues or false-positives are skipped vs removed by patrols and leads to backlogs that are not always quickly cleared manually. NJA | talk 11:50, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
“Biotch” can be short for “Bio Tech,” or “Biological Technology.” For this reason, I believe it should be removed from the blacklist. ⠀— Glosome 💬 21:27, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
While I'm sure we all appreciate the tireless efforts of the UAA bots, I feel we need to discuss this particualr kind of report. We get several of these a day, every day it seems, the report reading something like "<USERNAME> Tripped filter 579 (Possible sockpuppet account creations)". It seems to me that these almost never lead to a block. This isn't surprising since it doesn't seem reasonable for random admins patrolling UAA to know what Filter 579 does exactly. It seems intended to catch socks, not blatant username violations, so it seems more like it should be reporting to WP:SPI or some other more relvant location rather than to WP:UAA, for the simple reason that UAA basically doesn't deal with these reports as they aren't usually blatant violations of the username policy and that si the only purpose of UAA, so they just end up getting removed after a day or two. Seems counterproductive to me. Pinging @ DatGuy: as bot maintainer. Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:05, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
Propose review of bots making UAA reports: I agree with Beeblebrox. This relates somewhat to my request for consensus on this page (see SQL bot archiving of stale reports). The bot reported accounts can sometimes be significant where there’s nothing a patrolling admin can do in terms of username policy (unless it’s a blatant and serious issue e.g. YOURMUMISA[use your dirty imagination]). There may instances, though in my personal experience none, where a flagged “potential sock” is recognizable as such. These reports are, in my experience, add to or create backlogs for the bot page (note the auto backlog is set fairly reasonably at 8 on and 4 off). Also, and likely more relevant is, and unless I’m completely ill advised: sock account creations do not in any way come under username policy unless it’s an obvious and blatant “role account”. The only mention of “sock” in the username policy redirects to sock guidance about “role accounts”. I’d ask admins who frequent UAA, myself included, (hell everyone) to do a review of which bots are feeding to the bot reports at UAA and we discuss those appropriate and adding good intel vs. those not inherently pertaining to username policy and also where perhaps 1 out of 6 reports leads to a block (and even then whether it is a username policy block). Reports are not meant to just sit there so either something needs done on backlogs or more sensibly a review of bot reports and perhaps further consider a bot to remove stale reports. N.J.A. | talk 19:59, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Role account. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. funplussmart ( talk) 17:59, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
Isn't the USER:WMFOffice account in violation of WP:ISU? Seems like it should get hit with the template saying "Please note that you may not use a username that represents the name of a company, group, organization, product, or website." Seems kinda hypocritical.
Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask this, I'm fairly new.
LetUsNotLoseHear T 23:01, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
There's constant complaining on meta about how our username policy is too strict and we over block. Every admin who goes over there to get global renamer goes through a song-and-dance about how they agree the local policy sucks, but it is what it is and there's nothing to do about it other than help people get unblocked.
At the same time, we have actually disruptive usernames that can't be blocked because the policy doesn't spell it out, and despite WP:UNCONF existing WP:RFCN wants to see a policy section it violates, which of course defeats the entire point of RFCN because if there was a specific policy section being explicitly violated an admin could have just blocked.
I have long proposed shortening this policy to one sentence:
This would have several benefits
While I'm sure my one sentence policy is unlikely to ever occur, this page desperately needs to be simplified to a principles based policy rather than a rules based one. In it's current state, it's basically just an invitation for admins to IAR everything related to usernames. TonyBallioni ( talk) 00:03, 27 June 2019 (UTC)
Why are user names like:- Sohom ⁴⁵⁷⁸⁹ being allowed to even register. And, how to even type it? ∯WBG converse 06:56, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
One is WP:Sig, one is WP:SCRIPTPLEASE. LetUsNotLoseHear T 21:32, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
The use of .com is touched on a bit in WP:PROMONAME, but I'm wondering about file extensions added to usernames. The specific case which has led me to asking about this is Panopticon.exe, and it made me a bit curious. Are file extensions (.jpg, .png, .svg, .ppt, .doc, etc.) OK to be used in usernames? -- Marchjuly ( talk) 02:02, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
I apologize that my bot has been down for four months. Apparently a job got stuck on the server and new versions of it were not allowed to run. That said, anyone who doesn't see my bot in a few days, please flag me down so this doesn't go unnoticed for 4 months. -- Amanda (aka DQ) 02:58, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
It happened again and nobody let DQ know. Not as long this time, but the bot normally should be making several reports each day. Beeblebrox ( talk) 20:29, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
There is a discussion that may be relevant for watchers of this page at Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2019_September_18#Template:Uw-uall. Your input would be appreciated! -- Trialpears ( talk) 22:11, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
Hi all. Has anyone noticed many dozens of such names appearing in the creation log the past couple of days? Any thoughts what this is related to? Usually for events the log states “created for xxxxx event” etc., N.J.A. | talk 10:36, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
This came up recently when I was commenting on UAA - are there any rules on non-admins marking usernames as "not a blatant violation"? Just from watching the page, I've almost exclusively seen that posted by admins (with non-admins usually using the comment template), but I can't find an explicit rule on the matter. creffett ( talk) 23:15, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
looks like the person making those reports isn't very familiar with this policy, or WP:UAA/I. They were all rejected at once Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:33, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:AIVU/BOT. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Beeblebrox ( talk) 20:35, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:UFA/BOT. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Beeblebrox ( talk) 20:37, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:AIVU. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Beeblebrox ( talk) 20:38, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
I just started a discussion at WT:Blocking policy#Impersonation blocks which may be of interst to readers of thsi page. Please read it and offer your views. DES (talk) DESiegel Contribs 22:15, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
Initial discussion moved here from
WP:UAA to avoid cluttering that up while this is discussed.
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What's the general policy on usernames that use some "famous" person's name, but not necessarily in a way that implies they're actually that person? Does that need to be reported or not? For example, User:Jimbo's Consicence. Zupotachyon Ping me ( talk ⋅ contribs) 03:00, 10 November 2019 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 79#Feedback request - bot to maintain CAT:UAA and similar categories
* Pppery *
it has begun...
22:50, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
Had a RL discussion yesterday about the message our blocking templates for WP:ORGNAME violations, and I think we may have hit on a real issue here. None of these templates mentions what we historically called the "Mark at Alcoa" exception, that is, adapting an orgname to an acceptable name by adding an unique identifier for an individual.
What tends to happen now is that the user registers the organization name, (or the name of their PR agency working for that an organization) makes a draft or edits an article on that organization, and then gets blocked and told either it's because of their username or because of their username and spamming. The message they tend to get, whether intended or not, is "change your name and it's cool". And by the letter of our policy, this is true, at least for soft blocks. The issue is that if they go ahead and register a new, policy-compliant name, we no longer have that easy identifier that lets us know they have a WP:COI and/or are WP:PAID. This is not optimal.
So what I'm suggesting is that we modify these templates to suggest they use the <name>@<organization> format. I'm not suggesting exact wording since every time I do that someone else has better wording, so I'll leave that to ya'll should we decide to do this. Thoughts? Beeblebrox ( talk) 15:22, 9 November 2019 (UTC)
Could I please request an admin's attention at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User names#Randy in Boise? This is not urgent. HLHJ ( talk) 18:22, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
Hi, everybody! Recently I happened to fix a minor problem with linking to a user with the {{ Reply to}} template (actually, it was its redirect {{ U}}) here: Special:Diff/934088243. The problem arised from a destination username containing the 'equals' sign — the template syntax uses the '=' sign for parameter 'name=value' definition, so the username containing it gets decomposed and then abandoned, because the 'name' obtained doesn't fit a template parameter.
Shouldn't Wikipedia explicitly discourage using the character in usernames? Of course we can't forbid it, as there already exist accounts with '=' (as the example above shows), and we can't just invalidate or rename them all...
Possibly those users can be notified and asked to start a renaming procedure. But I don't expect many of them would do that.
Maybe the reply-to tool, mentioned here: Special:Diff/934087828, could be enhanced so that it will add an explicit parameter reference 1= to the username, when the username contains any non-alphanumeric character...? -- CiaPan ( talk) 15:33, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
{{
reply to}}
template per se, it's a known documented feature of MediaWiki's template parser that if any template uses positional parameters, and it is desired to pass into such a parameter a value that contains an equals sign, then either the parameter must be explicitly numbered, or some means of escaping the equals should be used. Thus, either of the following will work: {{reply to|1=7&6=thirteen}}
{{reply to|7&6=thirteen}}
when creating the account, I meant for my username to be lowercase-only, and while reasoning—being habit and aesthetic reasoning—are more likely to be dismissed, and the request to change dismissed as bothersome and naive (as may or may not be expected of a very new use), I hoped to know if it is still possible to alter the capital g in my username, Gaeneric, with a lowercase one.
tl;dr: I wondered if it is possible to request an aesthetic change to the username, namely, change Gaeneric to gaeneric.
thanks in advance for any response, and apologies for any inconvenience and the lengthy text. Gaeneric ( talk) 15:20, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
thank you very, very much! Gaeneric ( talk) 06:15, 17 April 2020 (UTC)
A user is a fan of the activities of a certain organization, and has already used the initials of that organization as his username in other-language Wikipedias, seemingly without having brought any complaints. He seems entirely benign, and doesn't pretend to work for that organization. However, he has made (entirely proper) edits relevant to the organization. However benevolent and amicable he may be, his username seems to be a clear violation of policy here. Yet he's unlikely to do much editing here, and if he abandons his username here then either he does so everywhere or his unified log-in breaks down.
What to do? One solution (?) might be to say: "Just go away. Don't edit en:Wikipedia any more; or, if you must do so, then don't do so when you're logged in." This seems extraordinarily unfriendly. Another might be to have him write a clear and conspicuous disclaimer on his user page. Would this be sufficient? Any other, better suggestions? (In particular, have I overlooked any comment about what to do when en:WP username constraints seem to clash with a username used uncontroversially elsewhere in the Wikimedia Encyclopedic-Industrial Complex?) -- Hoary ( talk) 23:59, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
It seems to me that even our policies do not seem to completely agree with each other on how to deal with role accounts. WP:NOSHARING seems to make shared-use usernames forbidden as a rule: "Sharing an account – or the password to an account – with others is not permitted, and evidence of doing so will result in the user being required to stop the practice and change their password." WP:ROLE also mentions that such accounts are "as a rule forbidden and blocked," but then turns around and says: "Such accounts are permitted only if the account information is forever limited to one individual; however, policy recommends that usernames avoid being misleading or disruptive." It is not clear how this declaration is supposed to be made according to WP:ROLE, but the exegesis that WP:ISU has is that it's the username itself that must contain this declaration (e.g. "Mark at WidgetsUSA", "Jack Smith at the XY Foundation", "WidgetFan87", etc.). I think the community has some discussion that needs to take place about what a better interpretation is.
My understanding of usernames implying shared use is that it's forbidden primarily because it's an attribution issue, that each edit any account makes needs to be attributable to a single individual for the sake of our licensing and for community accountability. The fact that there may be potential COI is a separate, although not often unconnected issue. But IMO I can't see a problem why in the not-entirely-hypothetical case that Hoary shares that the user in question should not be able to continue to edit under their current name, provided that they explicitly disclaim that they are not connected in any official capacity to that organization, especially if SUL is added to the mix. bibliomaniac 1 5 23:11, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
The Create User Account has a (help me choose) link above the box for entry of a user name; it links here. The piece of help I actually need is the "I'm bored with trying to come up with a name that's not already in use, show me which names *are* in use so that I can hope to have some chance of finding one that isn't". Absent that piece of help, creating a user account is a great way to waste a lot of time. While not strictly part of the username policy, it's a crucial piece of supporting information, that should sensibly be referenced from that policy – particularly given that this page is the target of the link I mentioned above. – Eddy 84.212.132.95 ( talk) 07:50, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
Template:Uw-botuhblock has a TfD open here. Figured anyone watching this page might be interested in commenting on it. Zupotachyon Ping me ( talk ⋅ contribs) 07:13, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm curious to know if the WP:ORGNAME rules apply to real-life organizations that are defunct. Also, I'd like to know if it matters whether the organization was notable or not for this policy to apply. The example I will cite is Draft:Gentle Fire, edited by the user Gentle Fire Group (which might be a sock, but that's a separate issue). -- Drm310 🍁 ( talk) 15:59, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
Right now we say Certain disruptive and offensive usernames (such as those containing contentious material about living persons, or those that are clearly abusive towards any race, religion or social groups) should be immediately blocked by administrators and suppressed from logs by Oversighters to protect Wikipedia and the subjects involved from harm. Requests for removing attack usernames from logs should be reported to the global Stewards team for evaluation and private removal from all WMF projects. I found this confusing -- I clicked on reported and had no idea what I was supposed to do there, so I came back here and clicked on suppressed from logs, got to Oversight, and sent an email from there. Am I supposed to also be doing something over at meta? —valereee ( talk) 09:44, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
If the account name is grossly insulting or contains personal information please contact a steward privately in #wikimedia-stewards or email your request to the stewards OTRS queue at stewards(at)wikimedia.org but do not post it here.So there's your answer (pop onto IRC or email the stewards), I'll update the policy to be more clear. GeneralNotability ( talk) 13:04, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
Please change my user name. From (its_dark_rishi ) to darkone97 Its dark rishi ( talk) 14:42, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Apologies if this is not the right place to ask, but would the username "Commissioner Gase" violate WP:BLPABUSE? Thanks. {{u| Squeeps10}} { Talk} Please ping when replying. 06:16, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
I was uncertain about this, as Red Shogun412 ( talk · contribs) has decent mainspace edits, so I trod lightly and simply left them {{ uw-userpage}} on their talk page. Should I have {{ db-g11}}'ed instead? About 1/3 of their edits are to their user page, and all of the recent edits. Not sure what to do, here. Mathglot ( talk) 18:00, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
I just removed Дювайц лобюжё from WP:UAA/BOT as a false positive. DeltaQuadBot claims it was "Attempting to skip filters using multiple similar characters", but that clearly isn't the case. The filter is tagged "Low confidence". This isn't the first time I've seen this for Cyrillic. @ AmandaNP: is this a known issue? power~enwiki ( π, ν) 06:13, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
D0 94 D1 8E D0 B2 D0 B0 D0 B9 D1 86 20 D0 BB D0 BE D0 B1 D1 8E D0 B6 D1 91
and bytes of value D0h occur eight times. I guess that's what the "multiple similar characters" relates to. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk)
22:56, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
D0
which have no separate meaning in the context of UTF-8, it is looking at bytes (octets). Seems like the fix is to get it to look at the right encoding. (Only here because I was at the house next door, peered across the fence and noticed an interesting-looking party going on...)
Mathglot (
talk)
23:27, 9 December 2020 (UTC)This has probably come up before, but is there anyway we can leave a space between entries? The current format plays Hell with my dyslexia. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 08:40, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Usernames_for_administrator_attention The spacing between the entries, or lack thereof, runs them all together. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 22:42, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
I'd still be interested in seeing if we can come up with a consensus that this would be a good thing, so we can show that to the Twinkle devs and bot operators and male it standard practice. Beeblebrox ( talk) 05:17, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
*:
or **
– it's as simple as that. If someone's dyslexia benefits from having a blank line between comments, please try using a single asterix *
instead of a blank line. That solves the problem for anyone using a screen reader and will probably prove just as effective in alleviating dyslexia when folks are examining the wikitext. I've preceded my comment here with the equivalent of a blank line (a line with just the current indent markup), which doesn't show in the rendered html, but does prevent Graham's screen reader from reading out the closure of six levels of
description lists and the reopening of six levels of new description lists (which is what a completely blank line does). HTH. --
RexxS (
talk)
20:46, 12 November 2020 (UTC)FWIW, it's the raw text in the edit box that makes my eyes jiggle. Other notice boards leave a gap between lines in the edit box without hindering readability of the displayed text. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 21:21, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
Ok, I'd like to proceed with asking tool devs for Twinkle to have it do this by default. So, just so we're all on the same page, what we would want to ask is that when adding new reports, at the bottom of each one the tool would add a line with a single asterisk to provide spacing between reports while avoiding any accessibility issues. Does that sound ok to everyone? Should we also ask that the response helper script that many admins use be set to post above this line (assuming that's not super hard to code) in order to keep reports coherent? Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:02, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Hello is there anyway to change my user name from SeanRMull to IrishLad13 ? Id rather not use my name. I did not think about this when I signed up. That mistake is on me. Thank you SeanRMull ( talk) 21:06, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
There are certain usernames that should definitely be hidden such as the attack username currently in UAA saying that someone should be burned alive. When reporting a username to UAA, hiding a username should give a placeholder text saying "name hidden" as in SRG, and it will link to the username. Steve M ( talk) 01:46, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
something weird has been done in the logs where it doesn't even show up as registered name anymore, my naïve guess would be that it's globally locked and hidden, or "locksuppressed" as GeneralNotability puts it — although I'm a bit surprised that would hide it even from oversighters. — 2d37 ( talk) 10:45, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
@ Steve M: Ok, that looks like some fairly basic coding that I'm sure we could duplicate here iff we had a consensus to do so. How to integrate it into the reporting process is less clear to me, at the very least we would want it added to WP:TWINKLE, which many users employ to make reports. So, I'd say if you really want to do this the thing to do would be to open a formal discussion or an WP:RFC about it, maybe at the village pump. Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:45, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
the username that just got blocked... that is... entirely unhelpful, especially since there are no block records that would imply such an issue. Primefac ( talk) 02:22, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Please take action on this user User:NaaraThevudiyaNayanThara. This user has cuss words in Tamil language in their moniker. I would ask someone to take action against this user. Tagging User:SpacemanSpiff as I believe you understand Tamil. Ihaveabandonedmychild ( talk) 03:14, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Ihaveabandonedmychild ( talk) 05:55, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
I can't be the only one who has noticed that new users somehow regularly wander in here and start spamming or otherwise posting things that don't belong here. It's worse here than any other policy page I have watchlisted. I can't imagine that brand-new users are just randomly typing "Wikipedia talk:Username policy" into the search bar, something, somewhere, is pointing them in this direction. I just don't know what that something is. Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:31, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
Please verify if a doubled 'another' in the point 4.:
in the orange frame at the top of Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention is correct. -- CiaPan ( talk) 15:58, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
(Courtesy ping AmandaNP) — genuine question because I'm not familiar with bot coding syntax, but I noticed that when reporting to UAA, DeltaQuadBot seems to use edit summaries that include [[User:AccountName]], as in this example. I'm guessing that comes from line 183 of this script (latest commit in 2015). But in 2018, an update caused edit summaries that contain [[User:AccountName]] to result in a ping to the user. Am I reading things wrong, or have all the bot-reported accounts, including the false positives, been getting pinged to UAA? Best, DanCherek ( talk) 08:57, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
@ Steve M: Regarding the addition to the UAA header: can you clarify what kinds of personal info you are referring to, and provide the policy or other source of consensus on this? "Personal info” is vague and seems likely to cause confusion. For example real or stages name are types of personal info, but these are specifically allowed by policy. Thanks for clarifying, N.J.A. | talk 12:02, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
User:Steve M - you edited the header to remove to reference to “another editor's” personal info, important context and wording copied from WP:OUTING, which was identified above as the source for recently adding this restriction to the UAA forum header. Is the message a user must go to oversight and can't report a username at UAA because it includes voluntarily given personal info, like the real name of another user? My questions are what mischief is trying to be addressed in the header, and what’s the source in policy for it, and how can we best communicate that in a clear way to users? Thanks, N.J.A. | talk 12:17, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
Currently, I am attempting to have a clean start per WP:CLEANSTART, and wish to create an account with an obviously satirical username; however, I am unsure of whether such a username would be appropriate or not, granted how this is Wikipedia and not a more laid-back wiki. Are usernames such as "Sockpuppet of an autoconfirmed user" generally acceptable here on Wikipedia or no? Thanks! 74.59.96.110 ( talk) 17:35, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
@ AmandaNP: DeltaQuadBot has gone for over 34 hours without adding any new reports, which is way longer than its usual several-reports-per-hour ( this was the last one at 15:51, 25 March 2021). Did something get jammed up somewhere? It also stopped editing the waitlist at that time. The bot's SPI and UTRS tasks appear to be functioning normally. Thanks. DanCherek ( talk) 02:05, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
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Can I edit Tiktok , Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and reddit, for a making more people use it. Ulimatecrimsonflash ( talk) 21:44, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Block on sight or leave polite note? Assuming no vandalism from user. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 14:29, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
harmonious editing difficult or impossible(though not sure if others may feel differently). In other words, to me these accounts are purely an AIV issue, not a UAA one; often 69420 is more of a "ha-ha silly meme" thing than someone intentionally trying to reference sex or cannabis. I know the bot reports them because they're likelier to be vandalism accounts, but even in those cases they're often already reverted and sufficiently warned. DanCherek ( talk) 14:52, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
So basically, with the recent rise of LTAs and other malicious users that are using highly inappropriate usernames, I am wondering something. Basically, in Steward Requests/Global, you are able to hide the contents of a username by leaving a placeholder. This can be userful in a number of ways. For example, it draws admin attention to highly offensive usernames, and it makes it harder for unsuspecting users to see the usernames. Basically, this can help in the case of usernames that are going to be hidden from logs and other usernames that should not be seen. Thoughts and ideas? I started this a while ago but retired before I was able to advance discussion too much. aeschylus ( talk) 00:24, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
MediaWiki talk:Signupstart § Protected edit request on 4 September 2021. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
08:10, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
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Archive 20 | ← | Archive 23 | Archive 24 | Archive 25 | Archive 26 | Archive 27 |
Section 7.1 Deleting and merging accounts has nothing whatsoever about merging accounts. Keith ( talk) 03:37, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
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"It is recommended that contributors not use multiple accounts without good reason."
Less wordy = "Using multiple accounts without a good reason is not recommended."
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.242.88.25 ( talk) 11:01, 13 July 2018 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 July 15#Template:UAA-no edits. Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:01, 15 July 2018 (UTC)
Can someone either point me to the WMF legal policy requiring accounts to be associated with an individual and not a group, or explain to me what is the rationale behind forbidding shared accounts? I thought it was a requirement per the ToU but I cannot see it anywhere in wmf:Terms_of_Use/en#Our_Terms_of_Use.
(Note that I am talking about names that violate WP:ISU but not WP:ORGNAME, e.g. User:FriendsFromFlorida.) Tigraan Click here to contact me 07:41, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
We do additionally have (potentially legal) problems when a user claims to represent an organisation (...)I would consider that to be better dealt by ORGNAME; the rationale is not "you should not use an account for multiple people" but "you should not have an 'official account'". User:BigCorpOfficial is problematic, but in the same way that User:BigCorpSpokespersonJeff is problematic, while User:SomeGalsAtBigCorp is not (in my view).
If I recall correctly we simply want one person to be held responsible for all of one account's actions.I can understand that as two sub-arguments, either of which I find unconvincing:
You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license, so anonymous editors do not get to complain that only the IP was attributed; I do not see why that should be different for shared accounts. The CC-BY legalese is incomprehensible to me, but the CC wiki says authors may waive attribution altogether; I do not think plausible that one could waive attribution entirely by not providing authorship info, yet make a text unusable because the authorship info does not unequivocally identify a single person. (Notice that "I do not think plausible that..." is not the same as "It is impossible").
Given the slew of false reports to UAA recently, I propose adding options to the response template that indicate that people should use another noticeboard. I created Template:UAA/sandbox for that purpose with four different new notices. I also removed the "csd" and "ep" options as a failed to see how they are relevant to UAA. Feedback? Regards So Why 09:49, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
There appears to be some confusion about the purpose of the "confusing usernames" parts of policy. That exists to protect the project from people who create a username that can other users might mistake for an official account, or for a bot account, or it's too similar to another username. It doesn't exist to allow you to ban names that you don't understand. Someone can create the name sjacjloufniw. You don't understand it, it confuses you, but it's not confusable with another account. Another user couldn't then create sjacj1oufniw, because that risks being confused with sjacjloufniw. DanBCDanBC ( talk) 12:20, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
So, since as they say policies should reflect practice, not dictate it, should language be added to the policy regarding the established practice of blocking ORGNAMEs that have made even one edit that signals a violation? Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:06, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
This guy — Preceding unsigned comment added by Braden1127 ( talk • contribs) 15:37, 1 September 2018 (UTC)
See (noping'ed): I am not black ( talk · contribs). Concerned about possible violation of WP:DISRUPTNAME bullet one, but seems to be an edge case, if it's a case at all. Only one edit so far; an inoffensive edit at Arabic (which I reverted per MOS). Can't decide whether to add {{ uw-username}} to their Talk page. Then again, maybe not worry about it unless they edit again, per last three comments under No at this 2014 Rfc? Mathglot ( talk) 04:51, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
I just kinda IAR’ed and did this, but maybe we should discuss it?
I've recently been removing obvious non-violations from Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention/Bot, per #9 of the instructions saying Obvious false positives reported by DeltaQuadBot and DatBot may be removed.; however, the page itself is in the admin backlog. Haven't found anything else determining whether or not #9 is an instruction for admins only, and therefore I should not edit it, or not. Checking page history, only bots and admins have edited it recently. Is there some instructions regarding if it is admin only that I have missed, or am I allowed to edit? Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 01:07, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
I like.-- Dlohcierekim ( talk) 13:05, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
Traditionally, we have handled reports on users with mild violations and no edits by placing them in the holding pen. After sitting there for a week or two these reports are reviewed again to see if they have edited in the meantime. This strikes me as needless busywork and I would suggest we change the procedure so that adding the “wait” response to a report is considered declining the report and it is simply removed a while later like other declined reports, leaving only “being discussed with user” and “keep monitoring” as the only reports that go to holding. Having reviewed hundreds if not thousands of such reports I feel the risk is fairly low, usually if they don’t edit the day the create the account they don’t edit at all. In the rare cases where they do edit, they can be re-reported at UAA and blocked. Beeblebrox ( talk) 18:09, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
After making my last remark I really started considering what goes on there and questioning if we should be doing this at all. The most common scenarios are:
I would guesstimate that only about 5% of HP reports lead to subsequent admin action. Is that enough to justify continuing to do this? Beeblebrox ( talk) 19:11, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
I propose adding to WP:Username policy#Promotional names, a third bullet point:
{{ uw-memorialblock}} has been nominated for deletion; see discussion. Galobtter ( pingó mió) 10:49, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
It is currently not clear in the policy how we handle case sensitivity.
On one hand the policy states usernames are case sensitive (with no elaboration).
On another, the policy states (in a completely different section: "Similar usernames") that "Usernames that are very similar to existing ones cannot be registered normally".
What this tells me is that important rules regarding user names are not covered by this policy. Instead this seems to be freely up to some programmer.
It also feels fairly incomprehensible to the regular user to use this policy to answer "can I log in as capnzapp?" or "can I register Capnzapp?". (I'm CapnZapp, btw, with a capital Z)
How can I answer these questions from the policy? (Without making an attempt at actual login/registration)
That I'm blocked by some software and thus that the issue is moot in practice (the answers are no and no, I tried) mostly feels like a convenient "programmer's rule". I would say the regular user simply cannot use this policy document to understand the actual rules that govern the subject of the article! It seems like the programmers can change the rules at any time with zero oversight or feedback from here. Isn't that a problem for you?
CapnZapp ( talk) 08:37, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
PS. I found exactly one talk section in the archives on this topic, but it was nine years old. DS.
Let me rephrase since some editors state they don't understand what I identify as lacking in the current article.
How can I answer the following questions from the policy?
Without making an attempt at actual login/registration, that is.
Please explain, step by step, how you envision a regular non-technical reader to achieve clarity here. Or to be honest I'd rather you don't, since my aim isn't to force anyone to go into defensive stance. My aim is to explain how this page fails to explain its basic tenets in a way that is comprehensible to the non-specialist reader. So I'd much rather you improve the article than reply to me :-) CapnZapp ( talk) 10:43, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
Wikipedia usernames are case sensitive, but the first letter is always automatically capitalized.( source)
The software will not allow you to register with a username that is already in use, or one that appears too similar to one that is already in use.(same source)
Morning all, I have noticed that User:HBC AIV helperbot5 makes lots of edits very close together. For the purpose of reducing unnecessary logging of actions, would it not be best to have it check every 90s or so and make all changes in one go rather than making 5 edits immediately after each other. RhinosF1 (chat) (status) (contribs) 07:34, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
So I've encountered a user that matched the username of (and has also edited) Ricardo Milos, but at the moment, the page is up for deletion. I have reverted one of their edits because the sources they used fell under WP:UGC, but the user reverted me back. I am unsure as to whether the user can be reported to this venue as a blatant violation anyway, despite the AfD. If you reply here, please ping me by adding {{u|JalenFolf}} to your message, and signing it . Jalen D. Folf (talk) 05:51, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I dont know if this username qualifies as posing "blatant and serious problems that they need to be immediately blocked." But the name and the associated images seems very offensive, even if it is not intended to be so. Check out User:A loose noose. Comments?-- Smokefoot ( talk) 17:48, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Such as 2600:1003:B85D:2583:7584:4EFE:D204:3CEE. There seem to be a lot of these about, they pop up and they mostly seem to only get used about once for some controversial borderline-disruptive editing. What's the story with them and why can't they be blocked or otherwise stopped? 2.24.71.30 ( talk) 20:23, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
User:Stanglavine and I are currently at loggerheads (that's probably a tad strong a term; we disagree!) over whether or not the name of a company plus its year of establishment - such as WidgetsUSA2009, for example - constitutes a valid username under WP:CORPNAME (see User_talk:Stanglavine#Rename_concern for the specifics). I'm bringing the discussion over here to get a few more opinions: is this type of username suitable to identify a single individual (which would make it acceptable under the policy), or does it still represent a company (which would make it an unsuitable username)? Any thoughts? Yunshui 雲 水 21:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
There is no obvious interpretation of the word confusing, and policy is extremely vague.
It should be explained what confusing means. Does confusing mean usernames which are misleading as to their meaning? Names that can not be read by a human? Names with similar characters to look like other names?
To remedy this, I suggest:
As I raised here, I propose SQLbot (or similar) to auto-remove stale reports as it does already for AIV. This would help alleviate or perhaps prevent backlogs where old items (perhaps there for 5-6 hours) have been skilled by patrolling admins or that have otherwise been marked with one of the UAA templates. Although I propose for the entire forum, the bot reported usernames section in particular tends to get very long at times where non-issues or false-positives are skipped vs removed by patrols and leads to backlogs that are not always quickly cleared manually. NJA | talk 11:50, 25 May 2019 (UTC)
“Biotch” can be short for “Bio Tech,” or “Biological Technology.” For this reason, I believe it should be removed from the blacklist. ⠀— Glosome 💬 21:27, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
While I'm sure we all appreciate the tireless efforts of the UAA bots, I feel we need to discuss this particualr kind of report. We get several of these a day, every day it seems, the report reading something like "<USERNAME> Tripped filter 579 (Possible sockpuppet account creations)". It seems to me that these almost never lead to a block. This isn't surprising since it doesn't seem reasonable for random admins patrolling UAA to know what Filter 579 does exactly. It seems intended to catch socks, not blatant username violations, so it seems more like it should be reporting to WP:SPI or some other more relvant location rather than to WP:UAA, for the simple reason that UAA basically doesn't deal with these reports as they aren't usually blatant violations of the username policy and that si the only purpose of UAA, so they just end up getting removed after a day or two. Seems counterproductive to me. Pinging @ DatGuy: as bot maintainer. Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:05, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
Propose review of bots making UAA reports: I agree with Beeblebrox. This relates somewhat to my request for consensus on this page (see SQL bot archiving of stale reports). The bot reported accounts can sometimes be significant where there’s nothing a patrolling admin can do in terms of username policy (unless it’s a blatant and serious issue e.g. YOURMUMISA[use your dirty imagination]). There may instances, though in my personal experience none, where a flagged “potential sock” is recognizable as such. These reports are, in my experience, add to or create backlogs for the bot page (note the auto backlog is set fairly reasonably at 8 on and 4 off). Also, and likely more relevant is, and unless I’m completely ill advised: sock account creations do not in any way come under username policy unless it’s an obvious and blatant “role account”. The only mention of “sock” in the username policy redirects to sock guidance about “role accounts”. I’d ask admins who frequent UAA, myself included, (hell everyone) to do a review of which bots are feeding to the bot reports at UAA and we discuss those appropriate and adding good intel vs. those not inherently pertaining to username policy and also where perhaps 1 out of 6 reports leads to a block (and even then whether it is a username policy block). Reports are not meant to just sit there so either something needs done on backlogs or more sensibly a review of bot reports and perhaps further consider a bot to remove stale reports. N.J.A. | talk 19:59, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Role account. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. funplussmart ( talk) 17:59, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
Isn't the USER:WMFOffice account in violation of WP:ISU? Seems like it should get hit with the template saying "Please note that you may not use a username that represents the name of a company, group, organization, product, or website." Seems kinda hypocritical.
Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask this, I'm fairly new.
LetUsNotLoseHear T 23:01, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
There's constant complaining on meta about how our username policy is too strict and we over block. Every admin who goes over there to get global renamer goes through a song-and-dance about how they agree the local policy sucks, but it is what it is and there's nothing to do about it other than help people get unblocked.
At the same time, we have actually disruptive usernames that can't be blocked because the policy doesn't spell it out, and despite WP:UNCONF existing WP:RFCN wants to see a policy section it violates, which of course defeats the entire point of RFCN because if there was a specific policy section being explicitly violated an admin could have just blocked.
I have long proposed shortening this policy to one sentence:
This would have several benefits
While I'm sure my one sentence policy is unlikely to ever occur, this page desperately needs to be simplified to a principles based policy rather than a rules based one. In it's current state, it's basically just an invitation for admins to IAR everything related to usernames. TonyBallioni ( talk) 00:03, 27 June 2019 (UTC)
Why are user names like:- Sohom ⁴⁵⁷⁸⁹ being allowed to even register. And, how to even type it? ∯WBG converse 06:56, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
One is WP:Sig, one is WP:SCRIPTPLEASE. LetUsNotLoseHear T 21:32, 1 July 2019 (UTC)
The use of .com is touched on a bit in WP:PROMONAME, but I'm wondering about file extensions added to usernames. The specific case which has led me to asking about this is Panopticon.exe, and it made me a bit curious. Are file extensions (.jpg, .png, .svg, .ppt, .doc, etc.) OK to be used in usernames? -- Marchjuly ( talk) 02:02, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
I apologize that my bot has been down for four months. Apparently a job got stuck on the server and new versions of it were not allowed to run. That said, anyone who doesn't see my bot in a few days, please flag me down so this doesn't go unnoticed for 4 months. -- Amanda (aka DQ) 02:58, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
It happened again and nobody let DQ know. Not as long this time, but the bot normally should be making several reports each day. Beeblebrox ( talk) 20:29, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
There is a discussion that may be relevant for watchers of this page at Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2019_September_18#Template:Uw-uall. Your input would be appreciated! -- Trialpears ( talk) 22:11, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
Hi all. Has anyone noticed many dozens of such names appearing in the creation log the past couple of days? Any thoughts what this is related to? Usually for events the log states “created for xxxxx event” etc., N.J.A. | talk 10:36, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
This came up recently when I was commenting on UAA - are there any rules on non-admins marking usernames as "not a blatant violation"? Just from watching the page, I've almost exclusively seen that posted by admins (with non-admins usually using the comment template), but I can't find an explicit rule on the matter. creffett ( talk) 23:15, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
looks like the person making those reports isn't very familiar with this policy, or WP:UAA/I. They were all rejected at once Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:33, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:AIVU/BOT. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Beeblebrox ( talk) 20:35, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:UFA/BOT. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Beeblebrox ( talk) 20:37, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:AIVU. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Beeblebrox ( talk) 20:38, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
I just started a discussion at WT:Blocking policy#Impersonation blocks which may be of interst to readers of thsi page. Please read it and offer your views. DES (talk) DESiegel Contribs 22:15, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
Initial discussion moved here from
WP:UAA to avoid cluttering that up while this is discussed.
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What's the general policy on usernames that use some "famous" person's name, but not necessarily in a way that implies they're actually that person? Does that need to be reported or not? For example, User:Jimbo's Consicence. Zupotachyon Ping me ( talk ⋅ contribs) 03:00, 10 November 2019 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 79#Feedback request - bot to maintain CAT:UAA and similar categories
* Pppery *
it has begun...
22:50, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
Had a RL discussion yesterday about the message our blocking templates for WP:ORGNAME violations, and I think we may have hit on a real issue here. None of these templates mentions what we historically called the "Mark at Alcoa" exception, that is, adapting an orgname to an acceptable name by adding an unique identifier for an individual.
What tends to happen now is that the user registers the organization name, (or the name of their PR agency working for that an organization) makes a draft or edits an article on that organization, and then gets blocked and told either it's because of their username or because of their username and spamming. The message they tend to get, whether intended or not, is "change your name and it's cool". And by the letter of our policy, this is true, at least for soft blocks. The issue is that if they go ahead and register a new, policy-compliant name, we no longer have that easy identifier that lets us know they have a WP:COI and/or are WP:PAID. This is not optimal.
So what I'm suggesting is that we modify these templates to suggest they use the <name>@<organization> format. I'm not suggesting exact wording since every time I do that someone else has better wording, so I'll leave that to ya'll should we decide to do this. Thoughts? Beeblebrox ( talk) 15:22, 9 November 2019 (UTC)
Could I please request an admin's attention at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User names#Randy in Boise? This is not urgent. HLHJ ( talk) 18:22, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
Hi, everybody! Recently I happened to fix a minor problem with linking to a user with the {{ Reply to}} template (actually, it was its redirect {{ U}}) here: Special:Diff/934088243. The problem arised from a destination username containing the 'equals' sign — the template syntax uses the '=' sign for parameter 'name=value' definition, so the username containing it gets decomposed and then abandoned, because the 'name' obtained doesn't fit a template parameter.
Shouldn't Wikipedia explicitly discourage using the character in usernames? Of course we can't forbid it, as there already exist accounts with '=' (as the example above shows), and we can't just invalidate or rename them all...
Possibly those users can be notified and asked to start a renaming procedure. But I don't expect many of them would do that.
Maybe the reply-to tool, mentioned here: Special:Diff/934087828, could be enhanced so that it will add an explicit parameter reference 1= to the username, when the username contains any non-alphanumeric character...? -- CiaPan ( talk) 15:33, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
{{
reply to}}
template per se, it's a known documented feature of MediaWiki's template parser that if any template uses positional parameters, and it is desired to pass into such a parameter a value that contains an equals sign, then either the parameter must be explicitly numbered, or some means of escaping the equals should be used. Thus, either of the following will work: {{reply to|1=7&6=thirteen}}
{{reply to|7&6=thirteen}}
when creating the account, I meant for my username to be lowercase-only, and while reasoning—being habit and aesthetic reasoning—are more likely to be dismissed, and the request to change dismissed as bothersome and naive (as may or may not be expected of a very new use), I hoped to know if it is still possible to alter the capital g in my username, Gaeneric, with a lowercase one.
tl;dr: I wondered if it is possible to request an aesthetic change to the username, namely, change Gaeneric to gaeneric.
thanks in advance for any response, and apologies for any inconvenience and the lengthy text. Gaeneric ( talk) 15:20, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
thank you very, very much! Gaeneric ( talk) 06:15, 17 April 2020 (UTC)
A user is a fan of the activities of a certain organization, and has already used the initials of that organization as his username in other-language Wikipedias, seemingly without having brought any complaints. He seems entirely benign, and doesn't pretend to work for that organization. However, he has made (entirely proper) edits relevant to the organization. However benevolent and amicable he may be, his username seems to be a clear violation of policy here. Yet he's unlikely to do much editing here, and if he abandons his username here then either he does so everywhere or his unified log-in breaks down.
What to do? One solution (?) might be to say: "Just go away. Don't edit en:Wikipedia any more; or, if you must do so, then don't do so when you're logged in." This seems extraordinarily unfriendly. Another might be to have him write a clear and conspicuous disclaimer on his user page. Would this be sufficient? Any other, better suggestions? (In particular, have I overlooked any comment about what to do when en:WP username constraints seem to clash with a username used uncontroversially elsewhere in the Wikimedia Encyclopedic-Industrial Complex?) -- Hoary ( talk) 23:59, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
It seems to me that even our policies do not seem to completely agree with each other on how to deal with role accounts. WP:NOSHARING seems to make shared-use usernames forbidden as a rule: "Sharing an account – or the password to an account – with others is not permitted, and evidence of doing so will result in the user being required to stop the practice and change their password." WP:ROLE also mentions that such accounts are "as a rule forbidden and blocked," but then turns around and says: "Such accounts are permitted only if the account information is forever limited to one individual; however, policy recommends that usernames avoid being misleading or disruptive." It is not clear how this declaration is supposed to be made according to WP:ROLE, but the exegesis that WP:ISU has is that it's the username itself that must contain this declaration (e.g. "Mark at WidgetsUSA", "Jack Smith at the XY Foundation", "WidgetFan87", etc.). I think the community has some discussion that needs to take place about what a better interpretation is.
My understanding of usernames implying shared use is that it's forbidden primarily because it's an attribution issue, that each edit any account makes needs to be attributable to a single individual for the sake of our licensing and for community accountability. The fact that there may be potential COI is a separate, although not often unconnected issue. But IMO I can't see a problem why in the not-entirely-hypothetical case that Hoary shares that the user in question should not be able to continue to edit under their current name, provided that they explicitly disclaim that they are not connected in any official capacity to that organization, especially if SUL is added to the mix. bibliomaniac 1 5 23:11, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
The Create User Account has a (help me choose) link above the box for entry of a user name; it links here. The piece of help I actually need is the "I'm bored with trying to come up with a name that's not already in use, show me which names *are* in use so that I can hope to have some chance of finding one that isn't". Absent that piece of help, creating a user account is a great way to waste a lot of time. While not strictly part of the username policy, it's a crucial piece of supporting information, that should sensibly be referenced from that policy – particularly given that this page is the target of the link I mentioned above. – Eddy 84.212.132.95 ( talk) 07:50, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
Template:Uw-botuhblock has a TfD open here. Figured anyone watching this page might be interested in commenting on it. Zupotachyon Ping me ( talk ⋅ contribs) 07:13, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm curious to know if the WP:ORGNAME rules apply to real-life organizations that are defunct. Also, I'd like to know if it matters whether the organization was notable or not for this policy to apply. The example I will cite is Draft:Gentle Fire, edited by the user Gentle Fire Group (which might be a sock, but that's a separate issue). -- Drm310 🍁 ( talk) 15:59, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
Right now we say Certain disruptive and offensive usernames (such as those containing contentious material about living persons, or those that are clearly abusive towards any race, religion or social groups) should be immediately blocked by administrators and suppressed from logs by Oversighters to protect Wikipedia and the subjects involved from harm. Requests for removing attack usernames from logs should be reported to the global Stewards team for evaluation and private removal from all WMF projects. I found this confusing -- I clicked on reported and had no idea what I was supposed to do there, so I came back here and clicked on suppressed from logs, got to Oversight, and sent an email from there. Am I supposed to also be doing something over at meta? —valereee ( talk) 09:44, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
If the account name is grossly insulting or contains personal information please contact a steward privately in #wikimedia-stewards or email your request to the stewards OTRS queue at stewards(at)wikimedia.org but do not post it here.So there's your answer (pop onto IRC or email the stewards), I'll update the policy to be more clear. GeneralNotability ( talk) 13:04, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
Please change my user name. From (its_dark_rishi ) to darkone97 Its dark rishi ( talk) 14:42, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Apologies if this is not the right place to ask, but would the username "Commissioner Gase" violate WP:BLPABUSE? Thanks. {{u| Squeeps10}} { Talk} Please ping when replying. 06:16, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
I was uncertain about this, as Red Shogun412 ( talk · contribs) has decent mainspace edits, so I trod lightly and simply left them {{ uw-userpage}} on their talk page. Should I have {{ db-g11}}'ed instead? About 1/3 of their edits are to their user page, and all of the recent edits. Not sure what to do, here. Mathglot ( talk) 18:00, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
I just removed Дювайц лобюжё from WP:UAA/BOT as a false positive. DeltaQuadBot claims it was "Attempting to skip filters using multiple similar characters", but that clearly isn't the case. The filter is tagged "Low confidence". This isn't the first time I've seen this for Cyrillic. @ AmandaNP: is this a known issue? power~enwiki ( π, ν) 06:13, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
D0 94 D1 8E D0 B2 D0 B0 D0 B9 D1 86 20 D0 BB D0 BE D0 B1 D1 8E D0 B6 D1 91
and bytes of value D0h occur eight times. I guess that's what the "multiple similar characters" relates to. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk)
22:56, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
D0
which have no separate meaning in the context of UTF-8, it is looking at bytes (octets). Seems like the fix is to get it to look at the right encoding. (Only here because I was at the house next door, peered across the fence and noticed an interesting-looking party going on...)
Mathglot (
talk)
23:27, 9 December 2020 (UTC)This has probably come up before, but is there anyway we can leave a space between entries? The current format plays Hell with my dyslexia. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 08:40, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Usernames_for_administrator_attention The spacing between the entries, or lack thereof, runs them all together. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 22:42, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
I'd still be interested in seeing if we can come up with a consensus that this would be a good thing, so we can show that to the Twinkle devs and bot operators and male it standard practice. Beeblebrox ( talk) 05:17, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
*:
or **
– it's as simple as that. If someone's dyslexia benefits from having a blank line between comments, please try using a single asterix *
instead of a blank line. That solves the problem for anyone using a screen reader and will probably prove just as effective in alleviating dyslexia when folks are examining the wikitext. I've preceded my comment here with the equivalent of a blank line (a line with just the current indent markup), which doesn't show in the rendered html, but does prevent Graham's screen reader from reading out the closure of six levels of
description lists and the reopening of six levels of new description lists (which is what a completely blank line does). HTH. --
RexxS (
talk)
20:46, 12 November 2020 (UTC)FWIW, it's the raw text in the edit box that makes my eyes jiggle. Other notice boards leave a gap between lines in the edit box without hindering readability of the displayed text. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 21:21, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
Ok, I'd like to proceed with asking tool devs for Twinkle to have it do this by default. So, just so we're all on the same page, what we would want to ask is that when adding new reports, at the bottom of each one the tool would add a line with a single asterisk to provide spacing between reports while avoiding any accessibility issues. Does that sound ok to everyone? Should we also ask that the response helper script that many admins use be set to post above this line (assuming that's not super hard to code) in order to keep reports coherent? Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:02, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Hello is there anyway to change my user name from SeanRMull to IrishLad13 ? Id rather not use my name. I did not think about this when I signed up. That mistake is on me. Thank you SeanRMull ( talk) 21:06, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
There are certain usernames that should definitely be hidden such as the attack username currently in UAA saying that someone should be burned alive. When reporting a username to UAA, hiding a username should give a placeholder text saying "name hidden" as in SRG, and it will link to the username. Steve M ( talk) 01:46, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
something weird has been done in the logs where it doesn't even show up as registered name anymore, my naïve guess would be that it's globally locked and hidden, or "locksuppressed" as GeneralNotability puts it — although I'm a bit surprised that would hide it even from oversighters. — 2d37 ( talk) 10:45, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
@ Steve M: Ok, that looks like some fairly basic coding that I'm sure we could duplicate here iff we had a consensus to do so. How to integrate it into the reporting process is less clear to me, at the very least we would want it added to WP:TWINKLE, which many users employ to make reports. So, I'd say if you really want to do this the thing to do would be to open a formal discussion or an WP:RFC about it, maybe at the village pump. Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:45, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
the username that just got blocked... that is... entirely unhelpful, especially since there are no block records that would imply such an issue. Primefac ( talk) 02:22, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
Please take action on this user User:NaaraThevudiyaNayanThara. This user has cuss words in Tamil language in their moniker. I would ask someone to take action against this user. Tagging User:SpacemanSpiff as I believe you understand Tamil. Ihaveabandonedmychild ( talk) 03:14, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Ihaveabandonedmychild ( talk) 05:55, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
I can't be the only one who has noticed that new users somehow regularly wander in here and start spamming or otherwise posting things that don't belong here. It's worse here than any other policy page I have watchlisted. I can't imagine that brand-new users are just randomly typing "Wikipedia talk:Username policy" into the search bar, something, somewhere, is pointing them in this direction. I just don't know what that something is. Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:31, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
Please verify if a doubled 'another' in the point 4.:
in the orange frame at the top of Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention is correct. -- CiaPan ( talk) 15:58, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
(Courtesy ping AmandaNP) — genuine question because I'm not familiar with bot coding syntax, but I noticed that when reporting to UAA, DeltaQuadBot seems to use edit summaries that include [[User:AccountName]], as in this example. I'm guessing that comes from line 183 of this script (latest commit in 2015). But in 2018, an update caused edit summaries that contain [[User:AccountName]] to result in a ping to the user. Am I reading things wrong, or have all the bot-reported accounts, including the false positives, been getting pinged to UAA? Best, DanCherek ( talk) 08:57, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
@ Steve M: Regarding the addition to the UAA header: can you clarify what kinds of personal info you are referring to, and provide the policy or other source of consensus on this? "Personal info” is vague and seems likely to cause confusion. For example real or stages name are types of personal info, but these are specifically allowed by policy. Thanks for clarifying, N.J.A. | talk 12:02, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
User:Steve M - you edited the header to remove to reference to “another editor's” personal info, important context and wording copied from WP:OUTING, which was identified above as the source for recently adding this restriction to the UAA forum header. Is the message a user must go to oversight and can't report a username at UAA because it includes voluntarily given personal info, like the real name of another user? My questions are what mischief is trying to be addressed in the header, and what’s the source in policy for it, and how can we best communicate that in a clear way to users? Thanks, N.J.A. | talk 12:17, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
Currently, I am attempting to have a clean start per WP:CLEANSTART, and wish to create an account with an obviously satirical username; however, I am unsure of whether such a username would be appropriate or not, granted how this is Wikipedia and not a more laid-back wiki. Are usernames such as "Sockpuppet of an autoconfirmed user" generally acceptable here on Wikipedia or no? Thanks! 74.59.96.110 ( talk) 17:35, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
@ AmandaNP: DeltaQuadBot has gone for over 34 hours without adding any new reports, which is way longer than its usual several-reports-per-hour ( this was the last one at 15:51, 25 March 2021). Did something get jammed up somewhere? It also stopped editing the waitlist at that time. The bot's SPI and UTRS tasks appear to be functioning normally. Thanks. DanCherek ( talk) 02:05, 27 March 2021 (UTC)
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Can I edit Tiktok , Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and reddit, for a making more people use it. Ulimatecrimsonflash ( talk) 21:44, 30 May 2021 (UTC)
Block on sight or leave polite note? Assuming no vandalism from user. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 14:29, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
harmonious editing difficult or impossible(though not sure if others may feel differently). In other words, to me these accounts are purely an AIV issue, not a UAA one; often 69420 is more of a "ha-ha silly meme" thing than someone intentionally trying to reference sex or cannabis. I know the bot reports them because they're likelier to be vandalism accounts, but even in those cases they're often already reverted and sufficiently warned. DanCherek ( talk) 14:52, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
So basically, with the recent rise of LTAs and other malicious users that are using highly inappropriate usernames, I am wondering something. Basically, in Steward Requests/Global, you are able to hide the contents of a username by leaving a placeholder. This can be userful in a number of ways. For example, it draws admin attention to highly offensive usernames, and it makes it harder for unsuspecting users to see the usernames. Basically, this can help in the case of usernames that are going to be hidden from logs and other usernames that should not be seen. Thoughts and ideas? I started this a while ago but retired before I was able to advance discussion too much. aeschylus ( talk) 00:24, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
MediaWiki talk:Signupstart § Protected edit request on 4 September 2021. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
08:10, 5 September 2021 (UTC)