On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 15:19:04 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

It is quite important to give the option for people to block a name in all other projects. This is important for people to be able to have a global identity. Forcing people to do this by hand is silly.

[...]

It should be the default in all *new* cases where there is no conflict, and it should be sought (socially and peacefully) in all old cases.

I'd agree with this, and I think it's important in this discussion to remember why it is that people want a unified login in the first place. The number one reason is *not to need to register and login seperately for each wiki*. Things like global watchlists, and talk page notifications, come a close second, while global preferences [with the ability for at least some to then be over-ridden project by project] are essentially a pleasant side effect. (With a bigger advantage once it's possible to pick your own language for the interface).

Now, given that registration and login aren't exactly hard to begin with, this means going to a new wiki has got to require an *absolute minimum* of effort under the new system, else we've lost the main advantage. Thus, a system where your name is just global, no matter what, is ideal: you go to a new wiki, your name works; any system which allows different names per project should probably allow opting out of this (i.e. an off-by-default option "confirm my desired username when I visit a new wiki"). If the user *does* want different names, they can be given a form, pre-filled with their default name, as a kind of "quick registration".

Ideally, the check for globally-logged-in status [i.e. on a site they haven't used this session, and may *never* have used] should happen as soon as a user loads a page from a new wiki, or at the very least when they first edit. There is, however, a technical problem, which I don't think I've seen mentioned elsewhere: identification cookies belong for security to one domain, and different Wikimedia projects have different domains - so, e.g., en.wikipedia.org and en.wiktionary.org can't access the same cookies. [See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_login/IMSoP2#Cookies for more]

This may mean, unless I'm missing something, that we'll need a "quick login" button - one click, and the site knows who you are because you already filled in your password on a different wiki. An additional touch might be to have a "...and log me in" box on the edit screen - so if you've done your edits, it will look up your global login and save the change in one go. Indeed, something like this (w/ boxes for name and passwd) might be nice *anyway* (Livejournal has it, for instance)...