Godwin’s Law cannot be broken by mentioning Nazi - it is a proposition that with time the probability of the state being met will approach 1, which it just has. Godwin’s law for this posting has just been met in this case.
What you want to strive for is Godwin’s Law being delayed as long as possible. Ideally you do want to break Godwin’s law by never mentioning it.
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The dagger is almost a universal symbol. It is in almost all the dictionaries and biographies and biologies.
It is far more immediate and saves space of using words cluttering up the user’s name.
Can we not just put this to a vote rather than endlessly debating it?
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You’re comparing Inaturalist curators you don’t like with nazis. Or something. I don’t even really follow. a good rule of thumb is unless there’s discussion about world war II or genocide or similar,. don’t bring up random Nazi comments.
What about greying out the text, e.g.
(sad trombone)
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How would anyone know that that meant, and how would it be communicated to those who actually noticed the difference in colour and font?
no matter what you choose, someone won’t understand it, that’s why you make a hover text type thing. It ames a lot more sense than using a vaguely religious symbol on a global site, though if they decide to do that, i don’t care all that much.
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As you can see from the conversation above, the same would apply to any symbol. So avoiding those with religious overtones seems prudent to me.
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The user profile should say more, e.g. on Facebook it says “Remembering [name]. We hope people who love [name] will find comfort in visiting their profile to remember and celebrate their life” in a banner at the top of the page: https://www.facebook.com/help/103897939701143.
Or on Wikipedia a banner saying “This Wikipedian is deceased. Their user page is preserved here in their memory” can be added to the profile page. And the Flickr option mentioned above. Not sure what that looks like in practice though.
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schoenitz
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So the main issue is just looking for an inoffensive icon that would indicate an “in memoriam account” when not on their profile page, right? Since on the profile page you could write out that it is an “in memoriam” account and that the user is deceased in whatever the reader’s language is set to.
On the genealogy sites they often just use a simple headstone icon to indicate a deceased person, sometimes with RIP on it. That seems kind of benign and easily understood to me, although it can look a little cartoonish. Maybe if you hover over it, just use the flyout text that states that they are deceased.
If someone was to call out the deceased with the @ or post a comment on one of their observations, maybe just have a pop-up that re-iterates that the user is deceased.
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I don’t think this is necessarily universally understood as it would apply to cultural or religious traditions that make and mark graves in that way. I think all symbols that are religious in nature should be avoided. A strike-through, asterisk, greying text, single letter for whatever translation of deceased “D” etc. make more sense to me and are appropriate and respectful for a diverse international audience.
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Wikipedia has an optional setting to display suspended users’ usernames as stricken through, which, like inactive users, is another status that’s helpful to know before you start engaging with someone through IDs or comments. Maybe that’s why strike through text struck me as a bit insensitive.
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I agree “struckout” is decidedly unfriendly: only for users cancelled or struck off or banned.
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The longer this thread goes on, the more squeamish I feel about people announcing my death on iNaturalist, whatever the words or symbols. Guess I’ll just have to live forever.
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Just to clarify, I didn’t mean the strikeout. It’s just all starting to make me feel it’s like changing someone’s profile for them, without their permission. I wonder if it might make some people want to leave instructions for their heirs to just delete their accounts?
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Perhaps options should be presented to users when they sign up for an account (and presented to all currently active users). We already make agreements for licensing of our content, and I personally would (happily) choose to divest “ownership” of all my iNat content when I died (I don’t really think of myself as “owning” my observations anyway, but perhaps I’m in a minority). Some users wouldn’t want to accept any loss of control/ownership, and they could simply opt out.
There are many private collectors of natural history specimens who have bequeathed their collections to institutions after they died with the full intent that they be accessible and useful for as long as they (the specimens) remain extant. So why not an option for a user to click a “Turn over my account and submitted content to iNaturalist administrators after death” button if they so desire? Many (hopefully most) of us are already adding observations to the database with the intent (for the most part) that they be useful data points now and for the future.
Of course, opting to divest “ownership” of one’s account/content to iNaturalist wouldn’t be a full divestiture where photographs, etc., can be used for any/all purpose (I assume original licensing decisions would stay in place), but simply an internal management divestiture where content added to the project is allowed to remain in the project and be curated by the project. In short, it would remain useful for all of the reasons that I and many others submit observations in the first place.
Leaning heavily towards the “Promote preservation of useful curated content” side of things seems appropriate, especially as observation losses would be most significant on the 50+ year-old observation side of things (i.e., in 50 years or so when statistics suggest that lots of current users will start to “leave the project”).
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I like this idea. And for the deceased symbol/word, how about just making it a choice on Account Settings of a couple of acceptable words and/or symbols, along with a choice to opt-out of that?
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As an aside, I don’t think Godwin’s law has been broken in this instance. From Wikipedia: “miscasting an opponent’s argument as [hyperbole] when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate”. The statement by Tony is not meant to dismiss an argument, but is adding to the discussion by saying an odious regime can still make something useful!
Re: the main topic. Just stamp a word across the users profile saying ‘dead’ or deceased. All cultures have a word or words for that. It may seem a bit brutal, but this is a Nature site - the duck (or whatever) has not ‘passed on’, but is dead. Why do we tread lightly around humans, but treat non-human life in a more straightforward way ?
Because we’re humans.
But the main question here is how to display the information succinctly everywhere else someone’s username is displayed. Only a small fraction of people go to every users’ profile with whom they interact. Most interactions occur on observations and the identify page.
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I think some flowers laid down at the base of a person’ icon would be tasteful and relatively universal.
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