(former wikimedia employee here)

A real names policy also means it'll have essentially no Japanese content. Online psudonyms, or anonymous editing are the norm in Japan.

That’s listed in the linked text:

> in some countries, such as Japan, online pseudonyms are the norm in all circumstances

I'd like to see a breakdown of the benefits next to the costs.

As it stands, the article you link here is a judgement seeking non-anecdotal data.

Additionally, splitting in "first" and "last" name is a terrible idea for a service that aims to be international. Not all names can be split as "first" and "last". Some people have two "last" names. Some languages (e.g. Hungarian) put the family name before the given name.

https://uxmovement.com/forms/why-your-form-only-needs-one-na...

What are the benefits of a real name policy?

It's easy to create bot accounts that have believable names, and a whatever vetting process put in place may just be a false sense of security that you're interacting with who they say they are.

It certainly doesn't make anyone less of an jerk. Plenty of racists sexists etc on facebook arguing with everyone else in the world.

How does is prevent impersonating someone not on the platform? Twitter is notoriously bad at this... you can just call yourself whatever you want as long as your target isn't a user of the platform and takes notice...

"Really terrible" is a bit harsh imo but your comment is very insightful.

Perhaps there is a middle ground? Some kind of novel solution that accounts for data coming from "real names" vs pseudonym differently?

If the problem is one of credibility, maybe some manual process that verifies the user is part of some prominent organization i.e. a professor in a given field or something could work. Give the user "flair" (similar to how reddit does it for r/askscience). They keep their pseudonymous username, but they're also recognized as an important figure.

> If the problem is one of credibility, maybe some manual process that verifies the user is part of some prominent organization i.e. a professor in a given field or something could work.

Only accepting users from prominent organization would compromise the goal of having 1000x more content than Wikipedia (see the failure of Nupedia).