[OWW-SC] usernames

[Austin Che]

"Reshma Shetty" <rshetty at MIT.EDU> spake sagely:

> I'm confused on two points ...
>
> 1) Austin are you proposing that we move to encouraging use of
> FirstnameLastname as the username for all future accounts or also try to
> move current account holders?

    We can do both. The first is trivial and requires no work. The
    second is technically quite easy for single accounts (not sure how
    difficult it'd be for many accounts). Note, I'm actually
    suggesting Firstname Lastname with the space so people's user page
    would be User:Firstname Lastname which could be a direct
    substitute for the many Firstname Lastname pages that currently
    exist in the main namespace.
    
> In general, I thought that we had been trying all along to have people's
> username reflect their real name in some way.  I consider the usernames that
> don't reflect a person's real name to be a failure of our ability to check
> username requests.  I don't see how moving to a more uniform username scheme
> like FirstnameLastname addresses this problem?

    Sure better checking of usernames is necessary and that's not the
    problem I'm suggesting we deal with (in fact, with a uniform
    scheme, we could just auto generate the user name). But as far as
    I know, there's not a stated username policy on OWW at all. And
    there's a difference between using a username that reflects their
    real name in some way and their actual real name.
    
> 2) Wouldn't an alternative approach be to seed the person's user page with
> their name and affiliation automatically upon account creation.  (Presumably
> this is doable with some coding effort?)  Thus, every user page would be
> seeded with some information about the person?  Is this an acceptable
> policy?

    Seeding a user page is a great idea but I think a different issue
    than the actual username.
    
-- 
Austin Che           <austin at csail.mit.edu>          (617)253-5899