Brion said:
/It doesn't solve our specified requirement (single Wikimedia-wide
namespace so a
single username works on all 600+ Wikimedia wikis transparently, no
muss no fuss).
/
Really? I'd think that an Interwiki-namespaced username would solve that
problem nicely, without requiring a big name-clash-fixing step when the
technology rolls out. I think that having a single username across all
wikis would be nice, if you didn't have to do resolve dupes across the
system, but if you do, it's really kind of a hassle.
I'd think that, since single-signon between wikis is a feature useful
only for a minority of registered Wikimedia users (how many actually log
into more than one Wikimedia wiki, ever? 10-20%, maybe? how many log
into more than, say, 5 wikis? Or log into more than one wiki on a
regular basis? 2%? 0.2%?), it'd be a good political idea to minimize the
namespace-sorting hassle. That nameclash-fixing step is gonna suck, and
it's not even helpful most users. It seems to me that a minor effort on
the part of "interwikiists" -- just using a project+language namespace
-- would be painless for them and unnoticeable for everyone else.
I think that if we use Interwiki prefixes on the UI side, OpenID becomes
that much easier. A user could login to French Wikibooks as
/wp:en:User:EvanProdromou/ or whatever, and the UI translates that into
the right OpenID URL (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EvanProdromou)
and goes through the OpenID two-step to get credentials checked. Under
the covers, the OpenID stuff would get worked out right, but we could
use simpler Interwiki strings for the UI.
In fact, a drop-down box for project, and another for language, could
also significantly reduce the complexity for users. For example, I could
choose "Wikipedia" out of "Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, ..." and
"English" out of "English, Français, Esperanto, ..." and then my
username on that project.
Lastly, I think having a couple of professional developers eagerly
awaiting a chance to get this implemented and who know OpenID and
authentication issues inside and out is a really good thing. We
shouldn't rollout every technology that people volunteer to throw into
the software, but this seems like a pretty good match between Mediawiki
(and Wikimedia) needs and what's being offered.
~Evan
P.S. Sorry about the broken threading -- I had some mail server problems
and missed my daily dose of wikitech-l.