LDan wrote:
That's a good idea, but aren't there some big technical problems with merging everything (except
for
the mailing lists)? For example, what if there are
two
different pictures with the same name? ....
That is a very valid point. And in fact there are many hundreds of these, but most are exact copies. It would probably be easier to use the largest image database (en.wikipedia's images and other media files) as a base, add then add all the others. For name conflicts we could ignore anything that is exactly the same size and use the en.wikipedia version (since it is probably exactly the same photo). All other name conflicts will have to be fixed manually. We have already had to do similar manual work when we disallowed external image display on en.wikipedia. That wasn't too painful or time-consuming.
The same goes for logins.
Most of the duplicate logins will either be from the same person or from a person who is no longer active (most of whom just created the account and never made more than 10 edits). We can make the job easier by auto-exiring all user accounts that have made fewer than 10 edits after say 120 days of inactivity. That should clear many thousands of user names and thus prevent many conflicts. We could even have a 100 edit / one year auto-expiration to clear out even more user names.
And why would merging logins fix the problem of people not going to the right wiki?
I didn't claim that. But it would reduce the threshold needed to participate as a logged-in user across wikis. Not having to deal with separate logins would tend to encourage more cross-wiki work.
Oh, and the name should not preclude non-image files. files.wikimedia.org or the slightly odd but more sexy multimedia.wikimedia.org would work better.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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