Back in the early 1980s, my sleepaway camp went to Boston, where we visited the Children's Museum. It had a computer with which you could interact.
Ever the aspiring nerd, I went over the computer. It asked me to enter my name. I did so.
It answered: "Reuven isn't a real name. Please enter a real name."
(I ended up entering "David," my counselor's name, just to get through that first screen.)
Be very careful when you vet names; for format, spelling, or anything else: As this article points out, there is a lot of variety among names in the world.
However, even well-meaning people can make mistakes, and it's useful to be forgiving. I have been teaching programming courses for years, and in one of my examples, I create a Person class. However, when I got to China, I realized that all of my slides talked about a "first name" and a "last name," which was both confusing and backwards from what my students expected. I'm working on updating these slides, so that they will be appropriate for all of my audiences. But as this article points out, it's a struggle to do so.
They were probably concerned about people entering offensive words phrases that would presumably later be spit back by the computer so they went with a white list.
Some countries have a list of "approved" names, and it's very hard to register a name not in it, for example in Argentina, every province has a list of approved names, and you have to write a letter with the etymology of the name for it to get approved:
Usually, I think, by the simple expedient of allowing them to keep their names. However, ISTR that in Thailand there is a requirement for anyone who becomes a Thai citizen to adopt a new, unique Thai-style surname (only people who are actually related may share a surname).
Back in the early 1980s, my sleepaway camp went to Boston, where we visited the Children's Museum. It had a computer with which you could interact.
Ever the aspiring nerd, I went over the computer. It asked me to enter my name. I did so.
It answered: "Reuven isn't a real name. Please enter a real name."
(I ended up entering "David," my counselor's name, just to get through that first screen.)
Be very careful when you vet names; for format, spelling, or anything else: As this article points out, there is a lot of variety among names in the world.
However, even well-meaning people can make mistakes, and it's useful to be forgiving. I have been teaching programming courses for years, and in one of my examples, I create a Person class. However, when I got to China, I realized that all of my slides talked about a "first name" and a "last name," which was both confusing and backwards from what my students expected. I'm working on updating these slides, so that they will be appropriate for all of my audiences. But as this article points out, it's a struggle to do so.