On Oct 6, 2005, at 19:50, Brion Vibber wrote:
Using URLs for usernames is going to be inherently broken on the wiki, as accounts are closely tied to their user pages on the wiki.
We've been doing some work integrating LID (the "other" URL-based digital identity system) with WikiPedia, and while ugly, even user talk pages work surprisingly well with very few changes, for the LID URLs we tried so far. I guess that will be the same for Dan and OpenID. The MediaWiki code is more robust than we thought ;-)
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There are basically two ways you can go I think:
- OpenID identifiers are a special class of users and handled
distinctly, like anonymous IP addresses are.
That's probably the most appealing route. This would apply to all REST-ful identifiers for authors, and potentially for non-URL-based "outside" identifiers as well, like URNs or XRIs (see the Identity Commons project, which is another personal digital identity effort).
Some mechanism for displaying properly formatted names and for picking a not-too-illegible title for the user page / talk page would need to be added to the core code.
The issue here is privacy and what follows from there. Within LID, for example, we have extensive facilities for voluntary "profile data exchange" (see the LID MediaWiki ;-) at http://lid.netmesh.org/ wiki ), so it's very straightforward to determine what VCard calls the "Formatted Name" for a user, but experience shows that people don't necessarily want others to see their real name in public places such as Wikipedia.
Also, there is a namespace issue. The reason DNS is hierarchical is that there are simply too many things that need to be named to be in one, flat namespace. As Wikipedia grows to, say, include every graduate student ever (kindergartener?), how realistic is it to stay with a single-level name space? And the whole point of OpenID, LID, and all the internet-scale identity efforts is to get away from local pseudonyms that need to be invented because somebody else took john.doe already at that site.
I'm afraid that I don't have a full-fledged answer here (not sure anybody does), except for the maybe-not-so-trivial one: what if users with REST-ful outside identifiers don't get a talk page?!? Chances are that their REST-ful identifier actually refers to their blog, or some place where people can leave comments ... Other than User:xxx, where else would something break? It's easy to format, say, SpecialListusers differently if it is a URL ...
- OpenID identifiers can be used to authenticate a named account in
place of a password, but you have to pick a valid username name and create an account.
Account federation with local pseudonyms... let's not do that, it's a kludge and not worth the effort ...
So much for now ...
Johannes Ernst
Johannes Ernst