On 30 Nov 2010, at 23:53, George Herbert wrote: > Two, nearly all WP users use pseudonymity rather than real names, and > for most people not having their real name attached anywhere gives > them a sense of anonymous empowerment similar to the truly anonymous > trolls seen elsewhere. We see a lot of behavioral problems that are, > to anyone who studies interpersonal communications online, extremely > common. People don't inherently humanize other pseudonyms; they don't > feel that they'll necessarily be held accountable in the same way they > would in real life for behavior, etc. Coupled with the inherent > degraded emotional communications in text-based communications, we > have a lot of the same behavior even with persistent pseudonyms. And > you can see a lot of that, where a pseudonym account gets sufficiently > bad community karma on WP and they go and sockpuppet off and create > another one, not caring about the underlying issue their behavior > raised. That sort of thing is not unheard of in the real world, but > it's generally felt to be the domain of scam artists and private > investigators and the like; at the very least, socially dubious.
I guess I'm one of the few that contributes under my real name. One of the options coded into MediaWiki is to submit a real name for attribution at the same time as registering (i.e. you specify both a pseudonym and a real name). By default, this is on when you use a non-Wikimemedia install of MediaWiki. However, within Wikimedia this is always turned off. I've wondered for a long time why this is - can anyone provide an insight into the decision to disable this? Thanks, Mike _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l