[[:MediaWiki:Logentry-bs-privacy-anonymization/en]] please verify the original text of the message

This message was changed yesterday with the comment "Change message to be gender-neutral \n This is done because the account that gender should be determined on, is already deleted by the point this message is created". The explanation makes sense, but the resulting message (with the doble "account") should obviously be improved.

Jon Harald Søby (talk)13:45, 2 November 2019

So why not simply "their account" ? (A "qqq" documentation may explain that "their" is the impersonal gender-neutral singular in English. I initially thought that "the account account" was a typo, an incorrect replacement here which does not make sense at all and causes more difficulties to translators or even native English readers, trying to guess what it means: there's only a single account, even if now it is deleted (actually anonymized without personal data like gender). I wonder if this can apply to bot accounts: do we have bots anonymized without also anonymizing the associated owner's account ?

Can we know if an anonymized acount was used by a bot and not a normal person, and does it keep a traceable link to the now anonimized personal account ? Is is safe or even possible to anonimize an account that has a bot associated (but not renamed)? or the inverse situation where a bot gets anonymized without anonimizing the account owner (accoding to policies this cannot be accepted is the bot is still active and authorized: a new bot account should be requested and associated in that case, and the old bot account that was anonimized should then be blocked from connection to all APIs, but not be masked at all given their past impact; it remains important to know that some past edits that were anonimized were automated, and allow independat reviews or reports to analyze their past actions in history, including info possibly documenting the automation rules they used: all bots have made unexpected errors but they are hard to find in the mass and such detection can take a lot of time even after a bot is blocked or no longer active at all) ?

Verdy p (talk)17:30, 2 November 2019
 

Why not simply using:

$4 has anonymized an account. New username: $5.

It makes clearer that the anonymized account is NOT the account owned and used by $4 perforing the change, but that the admin $4 made the change in the other account now named $5 (whose previous name is voluntarily hidden, but may be found by a few admins using restricted privacy inspection tools). I suppose that this message is the one that all other users will see in the public history log of the new user account (whose name ion $5 may look like "User:Anonymous-71ef38a9" as it was probably randomly generated with some name generator, and checking it did not cause conflict with another active account, or possibly selected manually by the admin doing the check himself).

Verdy p (talk)23:16, 10 December 2019