Anthere-
> 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.
Fear of trolls is not the reason why I am unfavorable
to this.
I agree with Anthere on this one. The real names feature simply adds
unnecessary complexity. It's difficult enough to convey the difference
between usernames and nicknames without an additional layer.
What we should instead work towards is easy changing of usernames. This
requires a database redesign (planned anyway) and rethinking signatures
(which we may also want to do to implement things like comment replies).
Essentially, we need to use the user ID instead of the username whenever
possible, and resolve it dynamically.
For example, a talk page thread could look like this:
== Chess ==
!52@408@200105151455< Dr. Floyd?>
!44@409@408@200105151456< Yes?>
!52@410@409@200105151457< Would you like to play a game of chess?
I play very well.>
Here, every line of dialogue begins with a sequence which contains a user
ID (52, 44), a comment ID (408-410), an optional parent comment ID, and a
timestamp. This allows us to dynamically render it like this:
Posted by: HAL 9000 on May 15, 2001, 14:55 UTC
Dr. Floyd?
[reply] [edit]
Editing full talk pages would only be done for refactoring and archiving,
where you don't need to see the user name anyway (the "Edit this page" on
talk pages should probably be moved to somewhere less prominent and
replaced with "Post a comment"). Section editing would be replaced on talk
pages with comment editing.
It would be possible to mess up the page by editing comment IDs etc., but
that's inevitable when you have thread-like features combined with full-
page editing.
Regards,
Erik