On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 12:48:59 -0400, Alex R. alex756@nyc.rr.com gave utterance to the following:
Any user name is a copyright pseudonym if it is not a real user's name. The user name (or IP address) is the only way to trace the attribution rights (this is especially inportant in droit d'auteur countries such as Canada where an author's moral rights must be respected, and if someone has questions about the validity of the copyright of the underlying text submitted to Wikipedia the only way to check that is to contact the contributor from Wikipedia (they usually call that 'due diligence' in the copyright chain of title review industry).
The GFDL requires that the last five authors of a document released be listed (see section 4(B) of the license). Thus, five contributors to a page may technically have to be listed by any GFDL republisher of that page.
Imagine someone who wants to publish a page and finds that one of the authors has an offensive name; they may decide that they cannot morally accept to use such a page because of the offensive character of the author's name which they must acknowledge.
Another point that it raises is that the majority of people are still on dynamic IP's. (Wikipedia probably has a higher proportion of static IP's than most websites due to the number of contributors who are staff at academic institutions. So with a not-logged in contributor on a dynamic IP, the only means of identifying the person is by asking the ISP who had that IP at that time. And most ISP's will flatly refuse to divulge that information. Under New Zealand's privacy laws I think the only grounds on which they are obliged or even allowed to release such personal information is a police investigation or as part of a civil lawsuit. A copyright enquiry simply doesn't cut it.