Usernames and Real names - MediaWiki-l

10 Apr 2015

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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