No Names Please

Some wikis seem to have a "no names" convention. Generally these wikis are newer, smaller or a single-topic wikis. However, WikiPedia is the largest wiki and it fosters a "No names, please" convention on its encylopedia articles.

There are advantages and disadvantages to the NoNamesPlease convention.

Advantages

1. Reduces the ability to create ThreadMode
2. Eliminates ownership issues
3. Discourages personal attacks and personal defensiveness: On the other hand, being anonymous might increase the likelihood of flamage and other uncivil behavior. On TheGrippingHand, anonymous uncivil behavior is easily {rectified|refactored|removed}.

Disadvantages

1. Extremely difficult to carry on a conversation
2. Reduces the back-and-forth exchange of ideas and opinions
3. Produces a rather sterile "Just the facts Ma'am" wiki (some would consider this a Pro)
4. Gives people less encouragement to contribute

WardsWiki comes closest to this in DocumentMode. Refactored pages generally have a NoNamesPlease summary up front, and a OneNamePlease list of contributors following.

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Actually, there are 4 options:

• Real names
• Global Pseudo-names
• Local Pseudo-names (per topic)
• Absence of names

The first 3 are fine by me. It's the last one that's a pain in wazoo.

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Discussion

LivingDocument wikis tend to have a NoNamesPlease convention (sometimes by accident). This may be due to the smaller user base of tightly-focussed, newer wikis: they simply didn't have the history, depth, and critical mass of WardsWiki.

I'm not exactly sure what NoNamesPlease is referring to. On WikiPedia, encyclopedia articles are not signed, but people use names for communication and coordination purposes. On article discussion pages, which are all in ThreadMode, almost everyone uses a name, often a real one. -- AnonymousDonor

This is an important feature of WikiPedia which many people are not familiar with: clear separation of article and discussion pages. WikiPedia uses the NameSpace idea: Encyclopedia articles are in the standard namespace (no prefix), discussions about articles are in the "Talk:" namespace, pages about Wikipedia are in the "Wikipedia:" namespace, images are in the "Image:" namespace. Because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, there should not be any discussion within article pages (I think the same principle applies to many other wikis, but here it is most apparent). On discussion pages, all comments are signed. One important aspect of Wikipedia discussions is that they tend to actually focus on how to improve the page.

Interestingly enough, the namespace idea evolved out of the concept of SubPages, supported by UseModWiki, which were already used in early versions of Wikipedia to separate "/Talk" pages from article pages. I recently added subpage support to the new, PHP-based Wikipedia software, which makes it easy to archive previous discussions by moving them to subpages (e.g. "/Discussion about signing comments"). I think most WikiEngines could learn a lot from Wikipedia. --ErikMoeller

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Compare: RealNamesPlease, OneNamePlease

CategoryWiki