[Wikipedia-l] Getting rid of nicknames

Mon May 19 09:37:30 UTC 2003

On Sat, May 17, 2003 at 10:34:17AM -0700, Axel Boldt wrote:

[...]
> 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? 

Do you memorize the realnames (and consider them relevant)? :)

I memorize 'ldc' easier than 'lee danier crocker' (and much easier not to
misspell! :)). not that it mattered, since it's just a string associated with a
virtual entity. I'll sign '--grin' no matter what my 'registration data' is,
but it would make it naturally impossible to click on me and see my pages.
(I'm far too lazy to sign [[Peter Gervai|grin]] all the time, you know.)

I'm not really sure about the accents problem, I mean, probably I just
missed the document describing the OriginalWikipedia character encoding,
which tells whether it's 8859-1, utf-8 or what. If it's latin1 then nicks
should not contain non-latin1 accents, and problem solved. If it's utf-8...
but don't try to tell me that. :) 

Fighting abusive nicknames by making restrictions and rules won't work. If
you disallow nickname "adolf hitler" then the guy going to sign up his
realname as such. Nothing would change except the loss of flexibility. In
the long run it's up to the people's (or the admins/sysops) power to
regulate. IMHO. 

> How is signing on a talk page with "Lee Daniel Crocker" any worse than
> signing with "LDC" and why do you call it "overkill"? 

People came from different environments. Some prefer nicknames for various
reasons. Some of these reasons do not exist in your world. :-) (Some of
these reasons in fact do not exist in any of the worlds, but anyway...)

grin