On Oct 6, 2005, at 19:50, Brion Vibber wrote:
Using URLs for usernames is going to be inherently
broken on the wiki,
as accounts are closely tied to their user pages on the wiki.
We've been doing some work integrating LID (the "other" URL-based
digital identity system) with WikiPedia, and while ugly, even user
talk pages work surprisingly well with very few changes, for the LID
URLs we tried so far. I guess that will be the same for Dan and
OpenID. The MediaWiki code is more robust than we thought ;-)
<snip />
There are basically two ways you can go I think:
1) OpenID identifiers are a special class of users and handled
distinctly, like anonymous IP addresses are.
That's probably the most appealing route. This would apply to all
REST-ful identifiers for authors, and potentially for non-URL-based
"outside" identifiers as well, like URNs or XRIs (see the Identity
Commons project, which is another personal digital identity effort).
Some mechanism for displaying properly formatted names
and for
picking a
not-too-illegible title for the user page / talk page would need to be
added to the core code.
The issue here is privacy and what follows from there. Within LID,
for example, we have extensive facilities for voluntary "profile data
exchange" (see the LID MediaWiki ;-) at
http://lid.netmesh.org/
wiki ), so it's very straightforward to determine what VCard calls
the "Formatted Name" for a user, but experience shows that people
don't necessarily want others to see their real name in public places
such as Wikipedia.
Also, there is a namespace issue. The reason DNS is hierarchical is
that there are simply too many things that need to be named to be in
one, flat namespace. As Wikipedia grows to, say, include every
graduate student ever (kindergartener?), how realistic is it to stay
with a single-level name space? And the whole point of OpenID, LID,
and all the internet-scale identity efforts is to get away from local
pseudonyms that need to be invented because somebody else took
john.doe already at that site.
I'm afraid that I don't have a full-fledged answer here (not sure
anybody does), except for the maybe-not-so-trivial one: what if users
with REST-ful outside identifiers don't get a talk page?!? Chances
are that their REST-ful identifier actually refers to their blog, or
some place where people can leave comments ... Other than User:xxx,
where else would something break? It's easy to format, say,
SpecialListusers differently if it is a URL ...
2) OpenID identifiers can be used to authenticate a
named account in
place of a password, but you have to pick a valid username name and
create an account.
Account federation with local pseudonyms... let's not do that, it's a
kludge and not worth the effort ...
So much for now ...
Johannes Ernst
http://netmesh.info/jernst
Johannes Ernst
http://netmesh.info/jernst