User name
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Various user name standards apply especially on large public wikis. This is one of the most important Wiki Policy items, yet to be decided - place any positions you wish to take on this at all issues not here. This page is a neutral presentation of the options used on other wikis.
A user page and user talk page will always have a formulaic name based on the user name, and these will be linked from recent changes and page history. Accordingly, making it obvious either that a specific user or faction or role has edited a page, or a deliberately open IP address is a priority.
Some wikis, such as Wikipedia, are a free-for-all with repute entirely up to informal factors.
A wiki best practice is to ensure troll names are obviously so. For instance, a pseudonym such as "Saddam Hussein" or "Feroshus of Trolls" is acceptable since the person logging in is obviously not Saddam or named "of Trolls" on his or her birth certificate, while one like "James R. Smertin" is not acceptable, since that might be a real person by that name, or trolls pretending to be real persons. For the sake of persons interacting with those not using their real names, it is fair to declare obviously that this is so - then people can decide whether to invest any trust in any obvious troll name. It is also wise to avoid permitting people to take names that imply roles such as "mediator", "sysop", "socialcapital", "economist", "boss", "Lowest Troll" and so on. Wikipedia was forced to control such names often in the past.
Most wikis that limit or ban pseudonyms try to enforce a use real names policy, however, there are serious problems with trying to do this for all edits and participants, user privacy and right to disappear and lack of suppo0rt for fly-by users being only one issue:
A use real names Wiki Policy is easy to subvert when new people are allowed to show up without knowing any existing participant, but, it tends to work for certain types of topics and when discussing facts hard to verify. It is however counter-productive to associate a real human body with every idea or spelling correction, for reasons basic to human psychology (people tend to very heavily weight negative opinions of others and underweight positive ones). It has been observed on highly political wikis that persons who participate a lot will inevitably be called "trolls" and excluded, by people who don't share their POV (while those people doing form a clique and claim to be neutral and objective). Accordingly, when simply executing operational policy, such as to delete pages that have already been approved at all proposed deletions or obvious spam or wiki graffiti, using role accounts is best. When executing social control such as block IP or toning down some overtly political view, then, using real names is best. Other policies tend to fail because they either make it too easy to gang up on trolls, or open up too many opportunities for trolls to challenge specific people simply for enforcing a due process decision. Either side might spread paraphrase, rumour or hearsay about them to other wikis, deny their right to disappear.
The worst attribute of a use real names policy is that it tends to encourage speculation about the real names of people who wish merely to make some anonymous comment and then disappear. This can lead to wiki witchhunts.
It is common in political wikis to use real names only to commit, vote or accept items todo, and to require those names in a specific form, such as "Michael_Pilling", so that they can be found by a search engine as one token. The open politics web relies on this, so with open politics in force it is mandatory to pick one version of one's name and standardize it everywhere, similar to the Screen Actors, Writers, and Directors guilds' conventions.
If a wiki is associated with some other web service, then, requiring the same standard wiki identity as is used on that service may be required, e.g. ~crash might have to redirect to User:crash, and using other strings to identify oneself might be discouraged or banned to keep relationships one to one. This policy has the merit of costing no more privacy than the login does.
