So, the way that MediaWiki is currently set up, we have two fields for identifying a contributor:
* user name * nick
I think (but don't know) that the idea here is that your "user name" is your "real" name, like "Evan Prodromou", and your "nick" is going to be a nickname, handle, or pseudonym, like "Mister Bad". This may come from the tradition on some wikis, like Ward's Wiki, Meatball, others, where using your real name is the norm.
It seems that on Wikipedia, other Wikimedia projects, and Wikitravel (which I'm most interested in), this is not the case. People treat a user name like a Unix, IRC, or other "user account": an abbreviated name or a pseudonym. The "nick" field is generally just used for making fancy signatures; in other cases, it's just used to provide a _second_ pseudonym or abbreviation.
Now, I'm the last person to put down pseudonyms. I think they're a crucial part of Internet culture. But real names can be useful for, say, getting credit as a contributor to an article. Somewhere along the way here we lost the slot for adding a "real name" to a user account.
You can't provide your real name even if you want to. Putting your real name in the user name slot is lost in the noise; I don't know, when you have a user account like "Bob Frapples", whether that's a clever pseudonym or actually your real name. Contributors who want to have their real name recognized now put them on their user pages. But this is kind of difficult for software to determine what a user's real name is.
I'd like to embrace the reality of the situation and have two identity fields, plus a display field:
* User account name -- a pseudonym or abbrev or whatever * Real name -- preferred form of legal name * Signature -- fancy formatting for signatures
For these reasons, I'd like to propose the following:
* We add a nullable user field "user_real_name". * The login/account creation page has an additional field for "real name", with an explanation that it's optional, and only for attribution, etc. * The preferences page lets you change your real name. * We change the documentation for the user name to note that it's a nickname and doesn't need to be your real name. * We change the documentation for the "nick" field to note its use as a "signature" format.
Automatic attribution tools can use the real name field if it's provided, or the preferred pseudonym ("Wikitravel user Hogwallop") if not.
The user account name would continue to be shown everywhere it is now, and the "nick" field would continue to be used primarily (exclusively?) in the ~~~ signature areas. The main thing is that if contributors want attribution under their real name, but identity in the system under a nickname, they get it.
Lastly, I think an easy way to change your user name is necessary, to make this shift in emphasis easier for those who want to. That's a whole can of worms, there, but I don't think it's impossible to deal with.
~ESP