Alex R. wrote:
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.
This brings up an interesting point, especially if Wikipedia is going to ever be published in paper. With online publishing, a link to the page history should suffice for attribution, but in a paper format the publisher would actually have to list five authors for every single article, and they certainly wouldn't want to list offensive names for those authors.
I think this whole thing is unfortunate though, and it's becoming increasingly clear that the GFDL exactly as written isn't *really* what we want to do. I think most Wikipedians would be happier with a license that required Wikipedia to be credited rather than five authors. As it stands now, the republisher *has* to credit five authors, but does *not* have to credit Wikipedia at all. They could give it their own name and not mention its connection to us at all, as long as they list the authors properly. I think most of us would prefer the opposite -- that they be required to credit Wikipedia, and not be required to credit the individual authors. But this would require a license change, which may be impossible at this point.
-Mark