So, whatever way we decide to go with licenses or attribution requirements when this debate has settled, at some point our prospective reader will find themselves confronted with a long list of names, whether printed on the page or at the end of a URL or steganographically encoded into the site logo. :-)
On this list, a minority will be real names ("John Smith"); the rest, if we discount the thousand variants on "anonymous" via our IP editors, are pseudonyms ("WikiUser") or modified names ("JohnSmith78").
In some cases, users adopt pseudonyms out of a desire for privacy, but in many cases, it doesn't signify much more than a simple decision that a username is a lot easier to work with internally, or a general habit of using some kind of nickname online... or the fact that "John Smith" was taken. And many of *those* people would, no doubt, prefer to be credited by a real name (or at least a real-sounding nom de plume...). Similarly, some of those using pseudonyms who don't want to use real names, may prefer a different pseudonym... etc, etc, etc.
It would be helpful to figure out some way of (automatically) being able to have a given username "translate" into a different name when a list of credits is generated - we would have a list which better reflects the attribution wishes of our users, and one which looks a little "neater" for the reuser to put in their Respectable Scholarly Publication. Win-win situation.
So how could we do it? At a rough sketch, I'm envisaging:
* each user has a "credit" field which they can (optionally!) set through preferences
* when we generate the list of contributors to an article, in whatever way we end up deciding to do that, the system can be set to read off this "credit name" rather than simply using the normal internal username, if one is available.
I note that MediaWiki already has a user_real_name field - could we use it for this sort of purpose? Would this be technically practical?