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Anon Sricharoenchai wrote:
According to the conflict resolution process, that the account with most edits is selected as a primary account for that username, this may sound reasonable for the username that is owned by the same person on all wikimedia sites.
But the problem will come when the same username on those wikimedia sites is owned by different person and they are actively in used.
One point worth considering: Active users will, in the vast majority of cases, specify an e-mail address for their account. If these are two different, yet equivocally active users, even with the same username, they will most likely specify unique e-mail addresses. As such, and correct me if this has changed, the accounts will not be merged and treated as the same account, at least not without contacting both users first to find a resolution. If they have not specified an e-mail address, then either the accounts will not be merged or, if the accounts are eventually merged, the users will be more than capable of contacting Brion or another member of Wikimedia's technical staff to work out a resolution.
The active account that has registered first (seniority rule) should rather be considered the primary account. Since, I think the person who register first should own that username on the unified wikimedia sites.
This approach seems even more arbitrary than the edit-count approach. Consider that almost every Wikimedia project has a User:I They are most likely *all* different individuals. Why should the first registered User:I suddenly contain control and attribution for all of the other User:I's out there?
Naturally, the editcount approach does not present a much better solution to this problem, but since almost User:I's except for the one on enwiki have been virtually deceased, it seems appropriate for enwiki's User:I to be User:I on all projects. The conflict practically fails to exist if the other User:I's have specified e-mail addresses, as they can then be contacted to work out a resolution.
Imagine, what if the wikimedia sites have been unified ever since the sites are first established long time ago (that their accounts have never been separated), the person who register first will own that username on all of the wikimedia sites.
Idealism is a nice world to live in. Unfortunately nothing about SUL is ideal. It's taking nearly a decade worth of history on hundreds (if not now thousands) of sites, containing an uncountable number of conflicts and questions about who is who and what is what, and attempting to glue them together in to one unified Wikimedia. Regardless of what approach is taken, this is going to be messy and cause a lot of headaches. Thus, the approach that is the most likely to minimize these headaches and this mess, namely the editcount-based solution, has been chosen.
The person who come after will be unable to use the registered username, and have to choose their alternate username. This logic should also apply on current wikimedia sites, after it have been unified.
And the detriment of a quite inactive user who did not even feel the need to specify an e-mail address now having to go by a different username is ...? Naturally, accreditation issues can be quite easily resolved by developers, and no user is going to be revoked of his technical rights incorrectly nor is another user going to suddenly obtain ungranted rights on any project. As such, I fail to see what the real concern here is.
- -- Daniel Cannon (AmiDaniel)
http://amidaniel.com cannon.danielc@gmail.com