On 8/13/07, Tangotango tangotango@ts.wikimedia.org wrote:
On Aug 13, 2007, at 10:41 PM, Anthony wrote:
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.
I should have been clearer - I meant that it doesn't matter what a user is called, *as long as they have a unique name* that does not cause confusion (i.e., is the same across all Wikimedia wikis).
I guess I just have to disagree. It does matter to me what my username is, and I think it matters to a lot of other people too.
Because people have conflicting usernames across wikis, there is much confusion as to the true identity of users who register on multiple Wikimedia wikis. That's why we have vandals impersonating admins of larger wikis on smaller wikis, and people being forced to do all sorts of arcane things (like linking to an edit authorizing a particular account as their own when voting for Wikimedia-wide elections or applying for adminship on Meta, etc.)
A globally unique numeric identifier would also serve the same purpose, but most humans just don't remember numbers as well as strings, so I wouldn't call it a user-friendly way to do things.
I just don't think the problem you describe is enough reason to screw things up for all those people who don't have the problem. A globally unique numeric identifier is what should be the first step. Then all those features which are supposedly dependent on SUL can be implemented. In reality nothing is dependent on SUL.
SUL also has the potential to create confusion, when people are forced to change their longstanding username and all those urls to their user page suddenly point to someone else's user page. I don't have any hard numbers on this, although I don't have any hard numbers on the number of times admins have been impersonated either. My sense is that the problems caused to those who are going to have to change their username are greater, but if I decide to start a true campaign to eliminate SUL I'll get better numbers. Maybe I should start contacting users with lots of contributions whose username conflicts with other users with lots of contributions and let them know about this plan to force them to change their name. Maybe I'm even wrong and this isn't going to be as big of a problem as I imagine.
Maybe SUL makes sense for admins, or at least for those admins who participate on multiple projects. Maybe it makes sense where there's no current conflict. Maybe it makes sense on a per-language basis. But I think en.wikipedia.User:Anthony and fr.wikipedia.User:Anthony should be able to get along. I'll probably win the eventual conflict between us, as fr.wikipedia.User:Anthony doesn't have very many edits, but I don't think there should have to be a winner. The two of us have gotten along perfectly fine without SUL.
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.
Without hard data to back this up, I'm not sure if this is an issue. (I mean, of course, the people actually affected are not going to feel the same way, and I do not mean to belittle their feelings in any way.) In the long run, will this adversely affect our goals to provide free knowledge to the world?
I think it will slightly, because I think it's going to be bothered by it. But besides that, there's one thing that *is* adversely affecting our goals to provide free knowledge to the world, and that's the fact that every time some feature is brought up like global blocking or global talk page notification or global language preferences, it gets put on hold because "that won't happen until after SUL".
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.
I personally think we should be looking at the Wikimedia projects from a long-term point of view; if we want the Wikimedia projects to be still available for the next generation, we should be thinking longer than the average Wikimedian's active length (mere months or sometimes a couple of years).
I think I am thinking from a long-term point of view, and frankly I don't see why you'd try to say I'm not.
The domain thing is rather a bit different; unifying something like that (and I'm not saying that's a good idea, since domains represent a hierarchy, as opposed to usernames, which are just strings), deployed across millions of computers across the world, is more than a few times more difficult than unifying Wikimedia usernames. I'm sure SUL is also difficult enough, but at least it's possible with few, if any, long-term adverse effects.
Fair enough. I'm keeping the domain name analogy in my toolbox for trying to convince others, because I think it's a good one, but I accept that it wasn't a good analogy to convince you of anything.
What I mean, in a nutshell, is that it's going to get 10 times harder for new users to pick a username.
True, but is that a problem?
It's a problem, but if it were the only problem I might overlook it. The major problem in my opinion is that SUL requires some people (let's say, more than 10 people) who have registered a username in good faith, to change that username.