Be prepared: Before you follow the steps in the next section to create your account, have a user name (or at least a couple of ideas) all picked out and ready to go. You may get your best ideas away from the computer screen. Read this section, then take a walk, carry a notepad, or go wherever you do your best thinking. When you come back, the registration process will go much faster.
Why spend so much time thinking about your user name? There are approximately seven million registered accounts at Wikipedia. So your chances of getting an easily remembered user name of (say) six characters or less are fairly low. You could use your real name. If you don’t want to do that, you should understand what types of pseudonyms are not acceptable (see What Isn’t Allowed), and then you might want to look at some pages on Wikipedia for ideas.
You can use your own name as the name of your Wikipedia account, assuming no one else with the same name has done so already. You won’t be the only editor using a real name, but you’ll certainly be part of a small minority of editors.
A real name makes it easier for you to remember your account name, and may encourage you to keep your edits polite and balanced. On the other hand, a pseudonym may make it easier for you to edit controversial topics. You should use a pseudonym if you don’t necessarily want your friends and colleagues to see your name on Wikipedia.
Pseudonyms have no disadvantages. You’ll probably want to use your real name only if it’s important to you that the world knows that you are editing Wikipedia.
If you were planning to build a custom home, you’d walk through model homes to get ideas. Similarly, you may get a good idea for a user name by looking at others’ user names. Here’s how to browse for user names:
You can type Special:Listusers into the search box (left side of screen) to look at the indexed list of all five million registered names. After you click Go or press Return, you see the Users page.
Keep in mind that many of the names, including the ones at the beginning (consisting solely of exclamation points) have been blocked as unacceptable. (Also, if you’re curious, the names in red are users who didn’t create a user page for themselves.) To see more interesting names than those that appear at the beginning of the list, type some text in the “starting at” box—the first few letters of a pseudonym you have in mind, for example—and then click Go. You can also use this page to see if a name in which you’re interested is already taken.
Typing Special:Log/newusers into the search box takes you to a log of the more than 5,000 new names registered every day. You may see particularly clever or interesting names that spark some ideas.
Special:Recentchanges takes you to a log of the most recent edits within Wikipedia. As in Figure 3-2, each line has the name of a page that was edited, followed by the editor’s name. Again, you may get some useful ideas as you look at the immense flow of edits (a hundred or more edits every minute!).
Figure 3-2. You can see some editor names on this portion of the Special:Recentchanges log page. In each line, the name of the edited page is at the far left, followed by the time of the edit (hours:minutes on a 24-hour clock), and then the number of characters added or deleted by the edit. User names in red indicate that the user has not created a personal user page. (You’ll learn how to create your user page later in this chapter.)
Wikipedia doesn’t allow user names that are confusing, misleading, disruptive, promotional or offensive. Nor does it let more than one person use an account. Accounts used by two or more people in a household, an organization, or your local book club, are against the rules. You can set up such accounts, but if Wikipedia’s administrators find out, they’ll block the account.
You can read all the specific reasons for rejecting user names at the Wikipedia:Username policy page (type WP:U into the search box). But assuming you’re well intentioned, the best thing to do is simply to pick a user name and see what happens. If the user name you pick is considered borderline, you’ll get a message on your user talk page (User Talk Page Postings) asking you to choose a new one. If Wikipedia’s administrators consider your chosen user name egregiously improper, they’ll permanently block your account, and you’ll have to go through the registration process again and pick another name.