--- Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com wrote:
I still think it's useful--I want my user page to be headed by a complete name, but using that long name in attributing comments seems like overkill. Plus, it gives people the ability to personalize a bit while not hiding behind a psudonym entirely.
Like many features of the software, I think this one just gives us a greater opportunity to judge the character of the user: if someone changes nicknames to deliberately obscure the attribution of comments, then we know how seriously to take those comments.
If users seriously abuse any feature of the software and disrupt our goals, we can consider taking action. But I don't see this particular feature as more abusable than any other.
Well, it clearly has been abused, though not in the way you suggest: I don't think people have used it to deliberately obscure attributions (except maybe in the recent case on the French Wikipedia). People have changed nicks around and have used nicks with non-printable characters however.
Even if used as intended (as an abbreviation of the overly long user name, I take it?) it causes more problems than it solves. New users do not know that "LDC" refers to the same person as "Lee Daniel Crocker" and cannot be expected to deduce it. After they follow a link to "LDC", they may realize it, but why should they have to memorize irrelevant facts like that for hundreds of contributors? This is an additional hurdle for newbies who already have enough on their plate when trying to penetrate the complex organism Wikipedia.
How is signing on a talk page with "Lee Daniel Crocker" any worse than signing with "LDC" and why do you call it "overkill"? It's not like you have to type it. Are we that short on bandwidth/disk space? :-)
Axel
P.S. What does the software do if somebody signs up with the username "LDC"?
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