Most places I go online, I use my real name. I use a screen name here because I already had a habit of using the same screen name in two other online forums. I use a completely different, unique screen name on Wikipedia, as I was forewarned that editing is contentious there.
I've seen some point-of-view-pushers on Wikipedia go to elaborate lengths to look up personal information about me, to give me harassing phone calls in the middle of the night, so I guess my screen name there didn't disguise my identity sufficiently. Over the years, most of those people have been site-banned in their first and second identities, but they still have plenty of sockpuppets and meatpuppets, and the administrators are always encountering new I.P. edits in support of the same skewing of point of view in that series of articles. (The articles are under ongoing arbitration committee supervision from a case
that began hearing evidence just as I formally registered as a Wikipedian.) So I mostly wikignome on articles I happen to look up for fun, and only rarely edit articles on the subjects I actually know best and have the most sources at hand for. Wikipedia's editing atmosphere is lousy that way--the lunatics are mostly allowed to take over the asylum.
Whoa, that is pretty nuts! I've been on Wikipedia for ~10 years, and for a few years (mid-2000s) was on the arbitration committee, and never ran across anything like that, either first- or second-hand, not even for the brief period of time I was somewhat active in editing articles relating to the Israel-Palestine and Greece-Macedonia disputes. The worst I've gotten is angry emails, though even those are rare and it mostly sticks to angry talk-page messages. Perhaps I was lucky; or perhaps "race and intelligence" as a topic brings out an exceptionally insane crowd? Sounds rather unpleasant.
I mostly edit articles relating to archaeology and (pre-20th-c) history these days, and I don't really run into trouble. If anything, my main complaint is not enough other people around; parts of the encyclopedia feel like ghost towns, where you can write whatever and nobody will comment either way.
Most places I go online, I use my real name. I use a screen name here because I already had a habit of using the same screen name in two other online forums. I use a completely different, unique screen name on Wikipedia, as I was forewarned that editing is contentious there.
I've seen some point-of-view-pushers on Wikipedia go to elaborate lengths to look up personal information about me, to give me harassing phone calls in the middle of the night, so I guess my screen name there didn't disguise my identity sufficiently. Over the years, most of those people have been site-banned in their first and second identities, but they still have plenty of sockpuppets and meatpuppets, and the administrators are always encountering new I.P. edits in support of the same skewing of point of view in that series of articles. (The articles are under ongoing arbitration committee supervision from a case
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...
that began hearing evidence just as I formally registered as a Wikipedian.) So I mostly wikignome on articles I happen to look up for fun, and only rarely edit articles on the subjects I actually know best and have the most sources at hand for. Wikipedia's editing atmosphere is lousy that way--the lunatics are mostly allowed to take over the asylum.