Evan Prodromou evan@wikitravel.org wrote:
So, there were some questions about using the real names functionality added for Wikimedia 1.3. They seem to have been rolled out for Wiktionary and other projects without a lot of problem.
The problems with this aren't likely to be seen in the first few days of it going live, and particularly not on wikis that suffer far less vandalism that the larger Wikipedias. The issue of irreversible vandalism has still not been addressed. This feature allows any user to claim the name of someone else and to insert that into the meta data of any article they edit, or have edited in the past. See http://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Angela&action=dublincor... for example, which claims
dc:creatorEvan Prodromou</dc:creator>
It claims this because I set my real name to be "Evan Prodromou".
No one but a developer can revert this. You are listed as the most recent editor of that page and you can't do anything about it.
I could have done this even if I had been blocked from editing, meaning that not only is the vandalism unrevertable, but also the vandal doing this is unblockable.
Until this is made reversible in the same way normal edits are, I think this feature has a high chance of being misused, particularly on the larger wikis where retaliatory vandalism against sysops is common.
Angela.
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