On 8/13/07, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
DNS's multi-2ld shape is *precisely so that* 3ld's which are identical won't collide, since they fall under different administrative spheres of responsibility. Why should Ford Motor Co., the Ford Foundation, and the Ford Car Club of America *not* be able to be ford.com, ford.org and ford.us?
My analogy used .com/.org/.net, which were all run initially by network solutions. Were that still true today I don't think the analogy would be any better or worse. Again though, analogies aren't meant to be perfect. My purpose was to show how bad of an idea it is to merge multiple already overcrowded namespaces (namespace, in the [[namespace (computer science)]] sense). Maybe it was a bad analogy though. I don't know.
A different situation pertains here: the WMF public wikis *do not* fall under separate administrative spheres, though I can understand the POV of some people who assert they might.
Count me under those who would say that the WMF wikis do fall under separate administrative spheres, actually.
There is a reasonable assumption that can be -- and clearly is -- made, by users, that the entire WMF is under one login namespace. [....]
I believe a random statistical sample of wikipedians not directly involved with SSO, and who don't have accounts on more than one wiki, would show a "believe that SSO's already there" rate much higher than you might think.
I think you're correct that a number of people do make this assumption. But I don't think that's an adequate reason to adopt a policy making it so.
I guess what has to happen before this can really be discussed is we need to drop the hypotheticals and come up with a semi-accurate list of actual conflicts. If a good portion of the conflicts are actually causing problems, then it's one thing. If most of them are just good faith collisions which wouldn't have even been discovered were it not for SUL, then it's another.