Never ask who wrote what
From eg
In any web service that can support credentials, there's no need to ask who wrote this.
Top ten reasons to never ask who wrote what:
- Anyone in the world could file a Canadian libel lawsuit against anyone that you happen to name
- It encourages futile stupidity like to require logins or attach a body to every opinion
- Sysop vandalism and sysop vigilantiism have been shown to reliably result from such questions.
- The question is meaningless as soon as there are multiple authors, as there will be if there is a right to refactor
- By focusing on the origin of comments rather than seeking to qualify comment, moderate or seek consensus on them, it distracts from more serious and important organization protocols that are required to uphold right of reply
- By attempting to hold anonymous trolls to the same standards as real persons who are voluntarily publishing as themselves, the latter are degraded: once attribution exists, somehow the person who an anonymous comment is attributed to becomes as important as those who committed to their words; This subverts development of the necessary organization protocols to deal with commit verbs.
- The question is already meaningless in the context of spambots, chatbots, troll organizations and other agents that copy the same text into many venues - there may well be no author, or the original author may be unaware of propagation of their views or the context into which it's propagated
- Where the opinion has any political importance, asking subverts political privacy
- Because the question is not reliably asked of everything, it amounts to selective enforcement or to require response to hearsay: that is, the hearsay that maybe it was some person hostile to goals or not credible who wrote it. These are not helpful concepts as they are factionally defined
- The person you ask might get it wrong. And then YOU could get a Canadian libel suit against you.
