Johannes Ernst wrote:
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 ;-)
Johannes, I'll be interested to see your patch when ready. Possibly we
can come up with a common framework, where OpenID is one login handler
and LID is another.
I wonder if you've had a chance to evaluate my patch for areas of
commonality?
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.
Right. Well URLs are in a universal namespace, and are unique. So as
long as we store/display URLs, I think it should be fine, no?
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 ...
I don't understand what is so special/difficult about the talk page?
Yes, there is a problem with "//" in the PATH_INFO. It can be worked
around using "?title=<encoded url" format. Am I missing something?
> 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 ...
agreed.