There have been some great efforts to discuss and specify what a
single-login implementatoin will look like in recent months. However,
the major disagreements form the last bout of specifications -- how to
deal with name conflicts -- have not yet been addressed.
See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Single_login_specifications
and the article page itself for some of the current discussion.
The current proposal suggests that "the user under a given name with
the highest edit-count" will "Win" that name, and all other users with
that name will have a fixed period of time to find a new username.
The idea of arbitrarily forcing one user to change names seems bad and
anti-consensus to me -- if two active users have the same name, I
think they should work out something among themselves -- or be allowed
to forego the privileges of unified login. And the idea of using edit
counts to determine "winners" is particularly unappealing to me (how
about seniority? usefulness of edits? current activity?).
Please check out the current specification and comment. There will be
a lot of detailed discussion about this implementatoin at Wikimania in
August.
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++SJ