On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Daren Welsh <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'd like to get feedback on how different organizations employ usernames > and real names in MediaWiki. On the open internet, such as Wikipedia, we > just use usernames and we're used to it. At my job, our assigned usernames > can be confusing (and no fun since we don't get to pick them). No one at my > job calls me "lwelsh", but they could probably figure out that it's me > since I'm the only person with "Welsh" in my name. With a larger group, > this might not be so easy (e.g. multiple John Smiths). > > Anyway, we have chosen to use auto-authentication tying our wiki login with > the primary network credentials. So our usernames are not necessarily easy > to remember. Aside from our standard user pages, we also have "Person > pages" where we put info about ourselves. So if someone wants to know about > Daren Welsh, they go to the "Daren Welsh" page (not the "User:lwelsh" > page). > > We want to use Echo and potentially build other extensions that would rely > on parsing usernames, but I think our users will have trouble with using > usernames instead of real names. For example, if a user wants to mention me > in a discussion post, they would want to say "Hey [[Daren Welsh]], what do > you think about this?" as opposed to "Hey [[User:Lwelsh]], what do you > think about this?" I believe this will be an issue because I doubt most > users will spend the time to go look up my username just for that instance > (and every other instance after that since they likely will forget). > > I've seen a few different extensions trying to tie usernames together with > real names better, but I feel like I must be missing something. Has someone > already addressed this? > > Daren > > > In Flow (the discussion and collaboration system currently in development),[1] they're currently working on implementing auto-complete for usernames, [2] and I've now filed a task for it to also auto-complete on alternate names.[3] (This had been discussed before, but not filed as a separate task). [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T93421 [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T95759 Hope that helps. -- Nick Wilson (Quiddity) Community Liaison Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
