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).
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.
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?
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).
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.
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? This happens to all popular sites. It's hard to get a Gmail or Hotmail username you want, because so many people have already got one they want. Incidentally, this is also the case for most top-level domains. However, people can be creative! The supply of intelligible usernames is almost unlimited. The slight inconvenience of trying to find an available username should not interfere with the best interests of the Wikimedia projects.
Cheers,
Tangotango