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.
If there is an offense username, a controversial name, or one which involves profanity, then this would tend to discourage the redistribution of Wikipedia content. Thus IMHO using an offensive user name is in violation of the spirit of the licensing scheme that we use in order to encourage redistribution of our work. That should be enough reason to prohibit the use of such names.
Alex756
----- Original Message ----- From: "Vicki Rosenzweig" vr@redbird.org
There's another problem with "use real names." I'm using mine. If the
other
Vicki Rosenzweig I'm aware of wants to participate in Wikipedia, I doubt either of us would think it a good idea for her to edit as "Vicki Rosenzweig 2".
And that's with an unusual name: there are a *lot* of "John Smith"s out
there.