On Tue, 2006-07-02 at 18:37 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
without
requiring a big name-clash-fixing step when the
That step is inherent in the requirement of a single namespace.
It is (at least, now it is), which is why I think forcing a single
namespace is a mistake. Setting up a single namespace when multiple
wikis first started would have been great; right now, as you pointed
out, there are 600+ user namespaces, and a big untangling step is going
to be necessary to unify them.
I realize you think it will bring the entire Wikimedia community closer
together, but I'm dubious. Wikimedia projects have always had a very
wide berth as far as policy is concerned; my guess is that this top-down
social engineering effort is going to be poorly accepted. Most people's
first and perhaps only experience with the feature will be finding out
that their username has been taken away.
It also seems unfair that the people who benefit from the minor
convenience of not using a prefix won't actually be paying the price for
unifying the user namespace. I don't think people are going to like
losing their user names just so that I can feel like part of the gang by
logging in as Evan instead of meta:Evan on Ossetian Wikibooks. For my
part, I don't want to pretend that I'm just another user on Javanese
Wikisource or Kashubian Wiktionary; I'm simply and utterly not. I think
it's a benefit for people to know at a glance what language I normally
speak and what project(s) I'm most familiar with. It also makes it
significantly easier for other users to check my edits on my "main" wiki
and evaluate what kind of contributor I am.
I think loosely-coupled authentication with namespace-prefixed IDs is a
very realistic reflection of the current social environment in
Wikimedia. I think the trade-offs (prefixed user names vs. people losing
their accounts) are waaaay in favor of prefixes. I think that OpenID
single-sign-on would be a very, very big improvement for people who have
a lot of accounts. I also think that users who want to associate with
Wikimedia as a whole could easily use their user names from meta: or
commons:. And I think that single-sign-on techniques that require Web
servers to have database access to a global account DB (or -- nightmare!
-- to 600+ local account dbs) unnecessarily constrain server deployment
and will probably negatively impact performance.
Anyways, thanks for hearing me out. I know you've thought this through a
lot, and I realize you've already started cutting code on the
one-big-namespace feature. A lesser programmer wouldn't entertain other
options; I'm glad you took the time to respond.
~ESP
--
Evan Prodromou <evan(a)wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel (
http://wikitravel.org/) -- the free, complete, up-to-date
and reliable world-wide travel guide