Pseudonymous editing 

copied from an email received offline
Hi,

I'm not quite sure how this works, but your wrote in my deletion review, "you say that your name and address are available, but your contributions to Wikipedia are pseudonymous."

Does this mean I hadn't registered? I did so last night, and not under a pseudonym as most people have. I always use my real name in signatures.

And I don't know how to post to your talk page because there appears to be no "post" link.

Thanks,
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
bathory@bathory.org
bathory@maltedmedia.com

Thanks for your message but I think perhaps my meaning was still unclear.  Whether you register or not doesn't really matter since anyone can register under any name.  I could go online and register a Wikipedia account as George W. Bush (at least, if it's not already taken).  Wikipedia has no means to authenticate your identity independently.  All that we know - all that we can know - is what you choose to claim about yourself.  

That's what I meant by pseudonymously - any registration, even if you say that it's your real name, is technically a pseudonym.  It is not independently verified against some external identity database.  And for the most part, that works out very well on Wikipedia.  We want users and editors to establish themselves through their actions and to demonstrate their expertise through their edits, not by making claims to outside credentials.

By the way, anyone could also register as Dennis Bathory-Kitzs.  That trivial misspelling would be easily overlooked by readers but would still be accepted by the system.  Such a person could sign their name the same way you do, attempt to mimic your pattern of speech (well, writing really) and make subtle edits just to discredit you.  That, in fact, is a real problem for established editors of Wikipedia.  When we find usernames that are suspiciously similar to established users, we look very carefully for signs of vandalism or deceit.  Users who appear to have done something like that on purpose are generally banned from Wikipedia.  But those are all manual checks.  There is no system that can automatically detect or prevent it.

Likewise, no one can inherently trust the email address.  The way internet domains are set up, anyone could register bathory.org and create any email name they wanted.  Like Wikipedia accounts, emails and internet domains are unverified against any external identity authority.  And that's before you consider the problems of email spoofing and forgery - both of which are far easier and common today than any of us would like to admit.

Most people are honest.  But there are enough dishonest people out there that we have to build our systems and our procedures in such a way that it doesn't matter whether they are telling the truth about their identity or not.  That's why Wikipedia has a policy against original research (which we mean as "a contribution or assertion based on personal experience") and why we never rely solely on self-published materials and why we bias our policy so strongly in favor of reliable sources such as websites owned by and operated by large, well-known organizations - organizations with both a vested interest in and the resources to find and stop spoofing.

Sorry to bore you with all this but my non-Wikipedia profession is information security.  The inherent problems of identity management and authentication occupy much of my waking hours.  How can a bank know that you're really you?  And how far can that trust be extended?  Under what conditions can an assertion be treated as reliable?  How do we balance that against the need to make systems and computers easy and accessible.  Unfortunately, there are no easy answers short of establishing a national identity database - something which would be in great tension with my role as a privacy advocate.  

Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now.  Thanks for your message.

To post to my Talk page, just go to the page and edit it like you would edit any page on Wikipedia.  The most common technique is to use the little plus sign next to the "edit this page" tab at the top.  That will automatically create a new section and give you a line to create a section header without having to know the wiki-markup symbols.  You should also get in the habit of signing your posts on Talk pages.  You can do that easily by ending your comment with four tildes (~~~~).  When you save the page, the MediaWiki software will replace the tildes with your username and the date-timestamp.

Again, welcome to Wikipedia.   (talk)