"A" == Angela sloog77@yahoo.co.uk writes:
A> Until this is made reversible in the same way normal edits are, A> I think this feature has a high chance of being misused, A> particularly on the larger wikis where retaliatory vandalism A> against sysops is common.
My first response is: perhaps there's retaliatory vandalism because sysops let themselves be trolled so easily. I find it hard to believe that grown men and women could let themselves be baited by this brand of kindergarten tactic.
My second response is: there are a couple of things we can do about it. Obviously, real names aren't unique, but user names _are_. We can handle this on the RDF side by making sure that not just names but also user names are listed in the RDF. This is a little hairy in the simple Dublin Core metadata schema we have, but the Qualified Dublin Core schema does allow for multiple data points on a single contributor.
In contributor credit blocks, we can link to the user page, like this:
<a href="/wiki/User:Angela">Evan Prodromou</a>
My last response is: since there are objections, I'll try to do the legwork to disable real names globally in 1.3. It does sadden me that there's such a troll-driven culture of fear on Wikimedia projects that something as simple as adding a real name can be cause for alarm.
~ESP