On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote: An author does not choose their IP address. In the vast majority of cases, they won't even know their IP address, or even what an IP address is! You cannot claim that an author is "choosing" to use a name if they don't even know what that name is. It is common in ordinary printed works for authors with names shared by other authors to be disambiguated in some way, for example by the use of middle initials. It is also common to have a paragraph of text about the author, saying who they are, possibly even explicitly telling people not to confuse them with another identically named person. Reasonable lengths are usually gone to to ensure that different authors are distinguished from each other. If, as you seem to be asserting, the attribution requirements of the GFDL allow firstly for an author's "name" to be assigned by an external party, without the author's knowledge or consent, and secondly for no effort to be gone to to ensure that the "name" thus assigned corresponds to a single individual, then it follows that citing "the author" as the author of any piece of work is perfectly acceptable. If this sort of thing was really what the authors of the GFDL intended to be allowed, then they wouldn't have even included a requirement for authors to be listed. Interpreted as you seem to be interpreting it, the requirement would be entirely redundant. Clearly this is not what the authors of the GFDL intended. I think any reasonable interpretation of the idea of listing authors would have the following two properties: (1) The name of the author, even if it is a pseudonym, should be agreed by that author. (2) Reasonable lengths should be gone to to make the name as near to unique as is feasible. (In a database, there is no reason for this not be become just plain "unique".) Even if it is agreed that pseudonyms are acceptable, it is still true that the current system doesn't even require *them*. Perhaps the edit page should have a notice saying, "This edit will be attributed to you under the pseudonym [some unique identifier here]. If you do not wish to use that pseudonym, you may wish to register a user name or, if you already have one, log in." That way, by clicking on "Save page", the user really would be agreeing to use this as their pseudonym. (It would also alert registered users who had been automatically logged out to the fact that this had happened. This has happened to me before, and I haven't noticed.) Then you really could claim that the user has chosen to use this as a pseudonym, and different pseudonyms would correspond to different people. Oliver +-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+

Oliver Pereira wrote in part: True, the author licensed their work to the world completely anonymously, so I have no obligation to list their authorship except otherwise. That said, any author familiar with the practices of Wikipedia has a reasonably expectation that they will be identified by their IP address, so I believe that I really ought to identify them thus all the same. It's up to the author to do this, not the deriver. But again, authors familiar with Wikipedia practice can reasonably expect a link to thier user page, where they might place information of just this sort. That's why I think that derivers should link to Wikipedia rather than just copying down the author list. -- Toby