Daniel Mayer wrote:
Couldn't we use the wikimedia.org domain name for handling user logins? That way a user only has to sign into their WikimediaOne login and will then be logged-in to every Wikimedia project and subproject.
The database with the needed tables don't worry about the DNS-name, I'm sure of that. I'm sure we can handle the nessessary rights to access all needed tables, even the user.tables in the different languages, without needing a DNS entry for it.
And the loginpage will be the nearly the same, only with a few more possibilities, most of this change happens in the background, thats the idea behind it. Of course we have to get all the parts in the CVS where there are calls to the user table and change them. But I think if we realy plan to do it this way it's a huge change, usually for more than one developer. I can e.g. try to created a proper proposel and write a lot of the things down, but I don't think i'm able to fix all php-pages etc. because I'm still not read and understand them all.
But before that happens (and periodically after) we may want to flush out several thousand en.wikipedia user accounts that have been 1) idle for more than say 3 months and 2) have fewer than 10 total edits since the account was created.
That would free up many user names so that actual contributors can use them.
1) is ok. but that's needed for all wikipedias, and although it should be a regular thing we need to do. 2) very bad. We will get [[User:foobar]] links marked red, and someone starts filling them (we had one case in the wiki.de). And we get those links in the history of pages.
I would prefere the solution I mentioned in earlier mails, to mark those users, instead of 'sysop' or 'bot' with the keyword 'delete'. If we modify that function that making links, in a way that a deleted user don't get a proper link, but only the text, we are keeping all pages sane (we don't need to fix them) without to much effort. (E.g: [[User:Smurf]] (undeleted) --> <b>Smurf</b> (deleted user)).