At the very least, let's make it default behavior that the username has two editable fields, display name and ID. Tilde-signature templates would show Display Name, and link to ID.

That allows for lots of flexibility, without any commitment that one or the other is a Certifiable personality or whatever. I guess users are welcome to put some kind of authoritarian "lock" icon next to their name, as you wish ;)

-Adam

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 4:01 PM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On 09/26/2013 01:40 PM, Steven Walling wrote:

Yep, agreed. Requiring real names is never going to happen on Wikipedia.

Yeah. Just be clear, I was not advocating it for Wikimedia sites.

Jared has, in the past, suggested that for users that choose to set
their real name (in preferences or during registration, if that field is
an option at that point), we could display Flow comments or similar
under someone's real name. I thought this was interesting, since the
real name field is specifically intended for public attribution purposes
AFAIK?

Yes, officially the main point of the real name field in MediaWiki is "giving you attribution for your work". Note that Wikimedia specifically overrides this setting to make the field hidden (not just optional, but sot so no one can fill it out).

If people did choose to fill in a real name field (which would have to be clearly marked as public), then it's worth considering displaying it in discussions.

Interesting example of failure of real name requirements: for a time
South Korea mandated that all websites over 100K visitors had to use
real names. It decreased abusive comments from drive-by users (1-2)
comments, but did nothing to encourage civility in longtime
participants.[1]

Very interesting, particularly the distinction between drive-bys and long-time users.

Matt

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