Daren Welsh writes:

Aside from our standard user pages, we also have "Person pages" where we put info about ourselves.

At my company (Cimpress/Vistaprint), we wrote a script to solve the problem of "Firstname Lastname" pages.

For each username, it looks up the person's real name in Active Directory (or LDAP, or whatever network credential system you use) and generates a redirect page for the person's full name. So it would look up Lwelsh, find the real name "Daren Welsh", and create an article [[Daren Welsh]] that contains "#REDIRECT [[User:Dwelsh]]". The script runs nightly to pick up any new employees.

If two people have the same full name, it generates a "Daren Welsh" disambiguation page that links to both people's user pages.

This has worked well for us for 3-4 years.

I strongly recommend this kind of solution instead of making "real name" pages that are different from the standard user pages. User pages are so integrated into the MediaWiki software, and it doesn't make sense to have two pages per person.

Hope this helps, DanB

On our private wikis, people are subscribed with their real unicode (Russian, Chinese, Arabic, French with accents etc) name “FirstName LastName”. They may also log in using (and they are always using) their e-mail ASCII address (three lines simple patch). If you want to address somebody, you still have to use [[User:FirstName LastName]], blanks and Unicode characters are accepted by Mediawiki. People with long names or using Unicode characters should copy/paste the Username. In general the Username is identical to the RealName, it differs for people who want to use the English transcription of their name.

Nicolas

Le 10 avr. 2015 à 20:22, Daren Welsh darenwelsh@gmail.com a écrit :

I'd like to get feedback on how different organizations employ usernames and real names in MediaWiki. On the open internet, such as Wikipedia, we just use usernames and we're used to it. At my job, our assigned usernames can be confusing (and no fun since we don't get to pick them). No one at my job calls me "lwelsh", but they could probably figure out that it's me since I'm the only person with "Welsh" in my name. With a larger group, this might not be so easy (e.g. multiple John Smiths).

Anyway, we have chosen to use auto-authentication tying our wiki login with the primary network credentials. So our usernames are not necessarily easy to remember. Aside from our standard user pages, we also have "Person pages" where we put info about ourselves. So if someone wants to know about Daren Welsh, they go to the "Daren Welsh" page (not the "User:lwelsh" page).

We want to use Echo and potentially build other extensions that would rely on parsing usernames, but I think our users will have trouble with using usernames instead of real names. For example, if a user wants to mention me in a discussion post, they would want to say "Hey [[Daren Welsh]], what do you think about this?" as opposed to "Hey [[User:Lwelsh]], what do you think about this?" I believe this will be an issue because I doubt most users will spend the time to go look up my username just for that instance (and every other instance after that since they likely will forget).

I've seen a few different extensions trying to tie usernames together with real names better, but I feel like I must be missing something. Has someone already addressed this?

Daren

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