Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-25653892-20141228180919

Is there any way to change the "A Wikia Contributor" text to something more concise? For instance, "an anon", or "a contrib", or even "IP" or something. (And yes, I am a b'crat on the wikia I want to change this in, so I have all of the right rights to change it as long as the thing to change is local.) I couldn't find anything in the MediaWiki pages, but I only had a glance at a few pages using advanced search, and it's likely the pages I'm looking for have not been created, and thus do not exist, despite having the default text set as "A Wikia Contributor".

I would have the suspicion that this is impossible, given that "A Wikia Contributor" is the "aka" alias for every contrib's account (as specified in their profile's speech-bubble thingy), and you can't really change someone's alias… However, I realized that the system calls contribs by their alias rather than by their IP, which can never happen for any other users; for instance, the system never calls me "Agent", but if you check my profile… And this weird exception to the rule is visible whenever a contrib leaves a comment. So it's probable that the "A Wikia Contributor" text is separate from the alias, because the system doesn't use aliases, so it's gotta be something different, right? In addition, there must be something setting contribs' alias to A Wikia Contributor in the first place. It can't be the default alias text, because the default is no alias. And all of the contribs aren't manually setting their alias to "A Wikia Contributor". I know I didn't.

So there has to be something, some process, or some MediaWiki page or the like, and I'd like to know how to modify it. At the very least I want the system to refer to them by a different, shorter handle, like "an anon" or "a contrib", etc. etc. rather than "A Wikia Contributor". I couldn't care that much less about the profile page, but if there's a way to change that too, then I guess I could.

So in short: does anyone know where to look or what to do to edit the "A Wikia Contributor" text? 