On 8/13/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)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.