On 2/9/06, Johannes Ernst <jernst+wikipedia.org(a)netmesh.us> wrote:
I'd have to concur with Brion here. Anything
related to digital
identity has technical, but also economical, political and *in
particular* personal/social impact.
I think there is general agreement on this point. As I stated earlier,
my interest in helping with applying the technology of OpenID to
Wikimedia's single-sign-on problem is independent of the decisions
that the organization makes about the user experience. To re-iterate,
I believe that OpenID is an appropriate technology regardless of what
namespace or identifier policies are in place.
Essentially, OpenID can be used without URLs as identifiers for
Wikimedia sites because those sites will already know where to go to
complete the authentication.
We are not just talking about identifiers here in a
technical sense,
but about a public Persona that identifies the registered mediawiki
user as a member of a particular "tribe" ... and we techies should
never try to get between a person and their tribe, because we'll
always lose ;-)
This is an interesting statement, because as far as I can tell, the
decision of the Wikimedia foundation has been to unify the namespaces
(thus getting "between a person and their tribe"). I note this not to
criticize the decision, but just as further evidence that the issues
are complex.
Josh