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Ballotpedia:User name policies
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This page is about policies on Ballotpedia about appropriate (and inappropriate) user names. Your user name is the name you choose when you register to edit on Ballotpedia.
User names on Ballotpedia shouldn't:
- Be inflammatory, provocative, rude or use profanity.
- Be the name of a commercial product.
- Be the name of a political campaign (such as "Yes on Measure G").
- Be the name of an organization.
- Be used in addition to another user name by the same person (see "More than one user name" below).
More than one user name
Use of more than one user name may be considered sockpuppetry or use of an online identity for purposes of deception.
Ballotpedia editors should not use more than one user name unless the other user name has a valid, shared purpose and the set of other user names associated with the shared user name are known and verified.
Elected officials and candidates
Elected officials and candidates are of course welcome to edit Ballotpedia and to do so using a user name that is identical or substantially similar to their real name.
However, the fact that a user can sign up on Ballotpedia with the name of an elected official or candidate, even if they are not that elected official or candidate, leads to the potential for mischief. Even if the edits are not in-and-of-themselves edits that might reflect badly on the elected official or candidate, it isn't acceptable to create an editing history that looks like it might have been made by that elected official or candidate unless the edits were in fact made by that person.
As a result, Ballotpedia's policy is that when someone does register using the name of an elected official or candidate, the user will be notified about this policy on his or her talk page and will be asked to send an email to Ballotpedia's staff within 72 hours confirming that he or she is that elected official or candidate.
See also
- {{Username}}
