On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 11:01 AM, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Raimond Spekking raimond.spekking@gmail.com wrote:
- Are there any points why such a transwiki (from all into all) would
be bad?
Yes. Create an account named Simetrical on whatever obscure wiki you like, make an article, import it to enwiki, and you've just framed me pretty convincingly and confusingly.
The solution to this is to change the history of imported pages to never assume Simetrical on Wiki1 is the same person as Simetrical on Wiki2. For example, if importing from en.wikipedia to en.wikibooks, the page history should attribute edits to "Simetrical@en.wikipedia.org".
@ isn't valid in usernames on Wikimedia so no one can create Simetrical@en.wikipedia.org on Wikibooks and try to cause problems with it.
Here's an example: http://scratchpad.wikia.com/index.php?title=User:Simetrical&action=histo... - made from manually editing the XML before importing it, but doing that isn't allowed on Wikimedia projects. Also, it would sometimes be better to link to the user page on the original wiki and not to Special:Contributions (though not if the original wiki has been taken offline, so ideally, there would be an option about where the link went).
Advantages:
No one can frame you for something you didn't do.
You would know exactly who made the original edit AND where they made it.
When content is imported to another wiki, someone can't later make the username Simetrical and claim wrongful attribution for those edits.
If Simetrical already exists on that other wiki, they won't get mad at being given edits that aren't theirs.
It gives some attribution to Wikipedia which is especially useful if people are importing content to non-Wikimedia projects.
Angela