nLab Anonymous User

Many edits to the nLab are anonymous and/or signed by pseudonyms.

Generalities

In choosing a name with which to sign their edits on the $n$Lab, users are free to pick almost any string of characters and without providing any justification. In this sense all user accounts are de facto anonymous: Even if signed with what may look like the name of an existing person there are no checks in place to associate any edit with any existing person.

(This policy is clearly both convenient for users as well as somewhat risky for the $n$Lab community: We rely on users not to abuse this liberty.)

Indeed, in the practice of editing the $n$Lab, the point of signing edits with a string of characters (a “name”) is not to identify a legal person behind that name (though that is, of course, for many users a desired side effect) but rather: To allow relating edits that come from the same source, in order to facilitate communicating about edits (such as on the nForum).

Therefore we kindly ask all users to choose a unique pseudonym for signing their edits and stick to using it consistently, as far as reasonable. That pseudonym might be the name which you read in your passport (we wouldn’t know, either way) or it might be any other string of characters which you fancy (we are relying on users’ decency in choosing reasonable handles), where the main point in the actual practice of communicating about $n$Lab edits is just that: it be unique.

In other words, we don’t care who you are elsewhere, but we like to know you as the $n$Lab contributor that you are, hence, if you will, as the scholarly persona which is embodied by the collection of your nLab edits.

Finally, people who deeply care about their edits being unrelatable to their whereabouts should know that every editor's IP address is (usually) listed in the entry’s history (found by clicking history at the bottom of any page).

In practice

In short, please choose a unique identifiable pseudonym with which to sign your edits.

In the past

From its inception up to some years ago, the nLab software would offer the string “AnonymousCoward” as the default for filling in the “Submit as…”-field. Eventually we found this was too condescending (though in hindsight there may have been some value to it) and then changed the default to “Anonymous”.

This worked fine until yet a few years later there occurred a sudden flood of edits of apparently (but who knows) multiple users who all signed with the exact same string “Anonymous” and most of whose edits were of decidedly low quality and kept needing intervention from regulars. But the real problem was these users would not react to commentary which their edits received on the nForum. Therefore, the only way we saw left to handle this problem was to try and block the string “Anonymous”. Remarkably enough, that was sufficient to stop the rogue editor(s).

This is why currently the nLab software will not allow you to sign with that exact string of characters. Notice that any variant of “Anonymous” still works.

So if you do insist on using something like “Anonymous” as your signature, you may regard it as a minimalistic CAPTCHA that you have to be able to find and choose a variant of that character string. But in the interest of the nLab project, it would be helpful if you solved a slighly more ambitious CAPTCHA and chose a pseudonym which is not just a small variant of “Anonymous”. Thanks!

(In fact, the same comments now apply also to the string “Guest”, which is the default name on the nForum.)

category: people