[Wikipedia-l] Getting rid of nicknames

Sat May 17 17:34:17 UTC 2003

--- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> wrote:

> I still think it's useful--I want my user page to be headed by
> a complete name, but using that long name in attributing comments
> seems like overkill. Plus, it gives people the ability to
> personalize a bit while not hiding behind a psudonym entirely.
> 
> Like many features of the software, I think this one just gives
> us a greater opportunity to judge the character of the user: if
> someone changes nicknames to deliberately obscure the attribution
> of comments, then we know how seriously to take those comments.
> 
> If users seriously abuse any feature of the software and disrupt
> our goals, we can consider taking action. But I don't see this
> particular feature as more abusable than any other.

Well, it clearly has been abused, though not in the way you suggest: I
don't think people have used it to deliberately obscure attributions
(except maybe in the recent case on the French Wikipedia). People have
changed nicks around and have used nicks with non-printable characters
however.

Even if used as intended (as an abbreviation of the overly long user
name, I take it?) it causes more problems than it solves. New users do
not know that "LDC" refers to the same person as "Lee Daniel Crocker"
and cannot be expected to deduce it. After they follow a link to "LDC",
they may realize it, but why should they have to memorize irrelevant
facts like that for hundreds of contributors? This is an additional
hurdle for newbies who already have enough on their plate when trying
to penetrate the complex organism Wikipedia. 

How is signing on a talk page with "Lee Daniel Crocker" any worse than
signing with "LDC" and why do you call it "overkill"? It's not like you
have to type it. Are we that short on bandwidth/disk space? :-)

Axel

P.S. What does the software do if somebody signs up with the username "LDC"?

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