Brion Vibber wrote:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
Really? I'd think that an
Interwiki-namespaced username would solve that
problem nicely,
No, it solves a different problem.
without requiring a big name-clash-fixing step
when the
That step is inherent in the requirement of a single namespace.
Sorry to be short about this, but we've had enough fights over this issue in the
past, and as far as I'm concerned the decisions have been made. I'll get flak no
matter whether I implement the previously-agreed conversion specification or
something new, so it's lose-lose for me personally. ;)
However to summarize, my view on why a single namespace is Good includes a few
points:
* Encourages community cohesiveness across diverse projects:
Many people are active in multiple projects. While they may be numerically a
minority, these are among the most active contributors, and thus key to the
projects' success.
One of the things making it hard now to pop over to another projects is that you
have to register another account; if you instead have a "foreign" account
saying
you're from another web site, this makes you stand out even more as not belonging.
We want the Wikimedia projects to be able to share people and content easily and
freely. Being an equal user on every project helps break down those borders,
where having a freakish foreign username would build them up.
* Related to that, we have projects specifically for sharing:
Commons and Meta are important. They should be as closely integrated as possible
to make media content sharing and community-wide issue discussion as easy to
dive into as possible. Being given a foreign name when you go there makes it a
foreign place instead of just a special part of the wiki.
* Avoids the 'tld problem':
Even though we all know top-level domains in the DNS system are supposed to be
disambiguators, everybody ends up trying to register their name in every
possible domain -- if you don't, the others mostly go to squatters, SEO scum,
and phishers who have no legitimate claim to the name.
The disambiguators are unsatisfying, and aren't necessarily enough to pass
casual inspection -- especially when you legitimately have a hundred accounts
named 'Angela' or 'Brion Vibber' which _mostly_ are the same person
already.
It makes more sense in my view to recognize that the disambiguators don't work
that well when they're needed and make more trouble when they're not, and just
jump straight to a single namespace.
When we add OpenID/whatever in the future later, that'll allow identification
from 'foreign' sites in a limited way which is useful. (Eg a post on the
LiveJournal article claiming to be from Brad Fitzpatrick could be verified as
really having from from Brad's LJ account, and a post on LJ about Wikipedia
claiming to be from Jimbo Wales could be verified as really coming from Jimmy's
Wikimedia account.) But that works because it's *all about* the boundary, and
drawing attention to the foreign boundary is what you want in that case. That's
not, I think, what we want inside Wikimedia.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)