On 8/13/07, Tangotango <tangotango(a)ts.wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Aug 13, 2007, at 10:00 PM, Anthony wrote:
To use an analogy, let's say I come up with a
plan for Single Domain
Name Resolution (SDNR). Forcing Wikipedia to register so many domain
names (
wikipedia.com/wikipedia.net/wikipedia.org/etc) is silly, so why
not let them register one address for all. So under SDNR, we merge
.com, .net, and .org. Companies register for one of the three
addresses and they automatically get all three. There's no longer a
need to type in "slashdot.com", I can just type in "slashdot". In
case of any conflict, where two people picked the same second level
domain name part, we look at how much traffic the various domain names
get and whoever gets the most traffic gets all three domain names.
Happiness.org (alexa rank 1,743,585) has 3 months to come up with a
new domain name or we change it for them, to
happiness-usurped.org.
After all,
Happiness.com (alexa rank 1,262,045) gets more traffic.
I'm not sure if I follow your analogy there, Anthony. Domain names
have an importance almost akin to a trademark on the Internet, and
companies use ridiculous amounts of resources for the upkeep of their
domains and usurpation of any conflicting ones.
A Wikimedia username, on the other hand, is merely a unique
identifier that identifies a person. Whether a user is named
Tangotango or Tangomango, if the user behind the usernames is the
same, then the quality of contributions from that account does not
change.
Well, I think it's a good analogy. Not perfect, as no analogy is, but
a good one. But if usernames don't matter, then what's the point of
having SUL in the first place? Just use an internal identifier
(User:8974287434) and keep everyone's public username(s) exactly the
same.
You assert that "[SUL] forces good faith users to
change their
username". Sure, but that's only because we have a bad legacy of
conflicting usernames on the 600 or so wikis we have, something that
probably should not have been the case in the first place. Also, are
that many "good faith users" actually affected? (Brion may have
posted the figure somewhere before, but I can't find it right now.)
The figure is increasing daily, and probably has increased
dramatically in the past few months. We have user:goddess and
user:HAL, and user:H, and user:Nat, and user:Anthony, and user:Stu,
and user:Glen all on en.wikipedia. I can't imagine these names aren't
duplicated on any other wikis.
IF SUL was implemented from the beginning, it would have been fine.
(Same thing, by the way, with the whole .com/.net/.org analogy.) But
it wasn't implemented from the beginning.
You also say that SUL will "[clog] up the
username namespace even
more than it already is". What username namespace? Do you mean the
User: namespace on all wikis?
I don't mean namespace in the technical mediawiki sense. It was a bad
choice of phrasing.
What I mean, in a nutshell, is that it's going to get 10 times harder
for new users to pick a username.
The number of user pages certainly will
not change with SUL; the number of people using a wiki will not
change significantly just because of SUL. If you mean the number of
registered users, the unified login script, as I understand it, does
not go and automatically create an account on every single wiki for a
particular user;
SUL, as I understand it, locks every username so that the same name
cannot be created on any other wiki. That, as it was explained to me,
is precisely what SUL is.
in fact, by unifying preferences such as passwords
and emails, it can be argued that SUL will actually *clean up* the
user databases.
None of those are features of SUL, as it was explained to me. SUL, as
it was explained to me, is a "feature" where every user has the same
username on all wikis.
If I am incorrect (or for that matter, if I'm correct), I'd appreciate
it if someone would point us to an official description of SUL.
It will be much less of a pain to change your email
address, for example. However, I'm not going to pretend that I'm a
SUL expert; I've only read through some of the documentation that
Brion has provided.
In short, I don't really understand what long-term disadvantages SUL
will bring to the Wikimedia universe; I can only see it as a positive
(and logical) thing to do.