Deliberate use of Anonymous on Open Profiles

Question

Is deliberately setting names to Anonymous on Open Profiles acceptable?

I was told yesterday that it is acceptable practice to set names for dead ancestors to Anonymous - even where the profile must be Open.  That doesn't seem right to me.

By allowing people to change open profiles to the name Anonymous seems to defeat the whole purpose of having such profiles be "open".  How can we have one shared tree if people are allowed anonymize ancestors?  What would be appropriate justification for this anonymization?

Would someone please provide clarification and guidance?

Thank you.

Comments

Is there an example of a profile over 200 years old where this is the case?

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This came up on a profile I was reviewing yesterday, and that profile has since been merged into another one.  It currently retains Anonymous as a Preferred name, marked with "certain". I have a question into the PM to ask if it is his intent to keep the profile Anonymous.

At this point, it is more of a theoretical question, based on what I was told was an acceptable practice yesterday. Here is the verbiage that was provided to me:

If a profile on Wikitree of a non-living person, has a current preferred name it should not be changed to Unknown or Anonymous unless there is some source to support the change. It may be better to add a disputed name section to the biography to facilitate a discussion about possible names rather than changing the name to Unknown or Anonymous if the name is uncertain.

Although I can understand Anonymous for living people, I really question its use for Open profiles, as my initial post indicated.  Unknown seems entirely different to me - assuming it is used where the information is truly unknown.

Thank you.

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Concur with Philip. Use of Anonymous is never appropriate for deceased persons.

Answer 1

Curious what response you get. If it was me you would probably get an "Oops" for an answer. I have snuck a few Anonymous's in by mistake. If you blanked out Preferred Name or or Proper First Name and press Tab the name reverts to Anonymous. Seems like a bug to me. At best it sure is not intuitive to me. Seems like all the privacy settings would be better than using Anonymous.

Even for living persons I would go with a tighter privacy setting. Then over time if the person becomes passes away or wants to participate in WikiTree you can simply change the privacy setting to be more open.

Comments

Marty points out something important. If a required name field is emptied, the system, after Save has been clicked, replaces that empty field with "Anonymous". This is something that should be changed.

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There are many hundreds of profiles for people who have not been living for over 100 years, who have Anonymous in their name. Looking at the list, it appears some were purposefully set to be Anonymous (Anonymous Anonymous, Anonymous (Unknown) Anonymous, and others), but some are likely to be accidental.  

It seems like something should be done to:

1. Keep this from happening accidentally in the future;
2. Change the ones that appear to be accidents based on information in other data fields, bios, etc.

What would be the best way to communicate to PMs who are managing a profile of a person over 100 years deceased, with Anonymous in their name, to let them know how they can fix the issue (if was created accidentally)?

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I agree as it has happened to me a couple of times inadvertently.  Fortunately I always go back and READ the updated profile and so I catch these glitches but many probably do  not.  Can Sysops correc this?

I do not know what to say about those who deliberately mark ancestors "anonymous" especially after they were entered with a name - it seems to defeat WikiTree's purpose of "one world tree" where we collaborate and find and encourage finding relationships.  I hope this can be addressed either here on by the WT leaders.