Pseudonymous editing   copied from an email received offline Hi  Im 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 hadnt 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 dont know how to post to your talk page because there appears to be no post link  Thanks Dennis BathoryKitsz bathorybathoryorg bathorymaltedmediacom  Thanks for your message but I think perhaps my meaning was still unclear  Whether you register or not doesnt 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 its 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    Thats what I meant by pseudonymously  any registration even if you say that its 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 BathoryKitzs  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 bathoryorg and create any email name they wanted  Like Wikipedia accounts emails and internet domains are unverified against any external identity authority  And thats 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 doesnt matter whether they are telling the truth about their identity or not  Thats 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 selfpublished materials and why we bias our policy so strongly in favor of reliable sources such as websites owned by and operated by large wellknown 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 nonWikipedia profession is information security  The inherent problems of identity management and authentication occupy much of my waking hours  How can a bank know that youre 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 Ill 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 wikimarkup 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 datetimestamp  Again welcome to Wikipedia