WARNING: The following post is a work of technical fantasy rather than practical reality.
On the usernames and passwords thing, if we imagine our doomsday scenario (meteor hits the
WMF data centre, the Foundation turn into evil psychopathic Nazis, whatever), one thing
that might be useful and archive-oriented developers might want to consider would be some
way of 'namespacing' usernames. That way, we could have it so a fork/new version
could specify that, say, all the usernames on all the existing content are usernames on
en.wikipedia.org, and distinguish those from the usernames on post-apocalyptic Wikipedia.
That way we can keep the attribution chain to the old usernames without the issue of
identity theft.
It'd also be a good step towards attribution in distributed wikis. This might be for
something like a future attempt at Citizendium (or perhaps someone wants to make a version
of Wikipedia with pending changes or the image filter or one of the other many things the
community cannot agree on).
In addition, it would be useful to be able to distinguish with usernames on sites that
reuse Commons images (if I upload an image to Commons with the username 'Tom
Morris' and then some non-WMF wiki reuses it, it may be attributing it to the local
user 'Tom Morris' rather than the Commons user).
Finally, it'd be potentially useful for wikis which use some Wikipedia content
combined with some local content. For instance, I know
wikiqueer.org uses Wikipedia
content with attribution, and combines the encyclopaedic content of Wikipedia with
non-encyclopedic community content that wouldn't meet up with Wikipedia's mission
or NPOV (they have the supposedly very controversial POV that LGBT people deserve equal
rights).
In all these cases, as well as our potential doomsday scenario, being able to clearly
distinguish between local usernames and usernames on other wikis might be quite useful.
The inner semantic web dork suggests that perhaps we could consider using something like a
uniform resource indicator (URI) to identify users. ;-)
We could also consider the possibility of allowing users to use OpenID or OAuth or
whatever the web identity mechanism du jour is to allow loose affiliation of usernames
between MediaWiki installs. That way you can establish the link between identities across
wikis (of course, if you don't want to, you don't have to).
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>