2008/11/1 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
What type of data substantiation are they planning on doing using the username they ask for? A lot of the questions are moot once they have the username - you can just look up simple data points like number of articles edited etc.
Yes, for users who provide the name, they're planning to validate at least the basic edit counts and such -- I'm not sure what additional validation, but you can ask them at info(at)wikipediastudy(dot)org.