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
That is an /extremely/ interesting point which pretty much shows that
dealing with issue is a necessity.
JT
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