Jimmy Wales wrote:
Under a system like you're proposing, I could
create a new 'master'
account, 'Jimbo Wales', and then consolidate all of my 'local'
accounts under it, so for example, 'Jimbo Wales' could "own"
'en:Jimbo
Wales' and 'de:Jimbo Wales' and even 'jp:Yojimbo' (just a joke, I
don't really have such an account as that.
I love the concept, but does it introduce a layer of unfriendly
complexity for the end user?
Well, it should work exacly this way, but only for existing accounts.
I try to explain some steps of the concept, I hope it helps:
Creating a user will only works on the 'master'. All the names used on any
other language could be blocked, if we want 'Jimbo Wales' give a change to
keep 'Jimbo Wales', if not, the master has no limits in choosing names.
If we want that you can make 'en:Jimbo Wales' a master account, we ask on
the login form if and where (here: en) you have an old account. And we
query the passwort. If everything matches fine, we create the master
account Jimbo Wales and now you can add additional accounts from other
languages. We can present each language a 'Jimbo Wales' is known, and ask
for Passwort to activate the name on the master. If no 'Jimbo Wales' in any
other languages is left to add, we can ask to remove all old accounts on
the languages and remove the data about the other language links in the
master and mark it as 'full converted' user. Than you have single sign on.
There may be some more questions on the login form, but and that why I
created this proposal, someone with different names on different languages
can keep those names. Without broken links in the Article-Histories etc.
(Additionaly I still think a user_right 'deleted' should be added, to
handle this mater of broken Username links properly.) And new users get
automatically single-sign-on. Of course we can adding different profiles on
different languages, but first of all my idea was to get rid of those
language specific account, without the need to give everybody a new
username and get long protest mails.
The proposal try to follow the idea: single-singn-on for new users, and
giving old users a chance to keep their old name. More technical stuff
(more inteligence in the database) is better than unlucky users.
Additionaly we can search for old, unused users and remove them (no
reference to them in article histories, texts etc.) to keep the
User-Databases clear. But thats a mainainance issue.
The way I was thinking of it is that people could have
a single signon
across all the wikipedias, and if they want a different id on one,
then they could just create it, and it would work everywhere of
course, but they'd just have two accounts and could use one on 'jp'
and one on 'en' if they wanted.
Well the concept tries to get rid of those 'language-usernames' but it
support's them, for old users. Of course we can add the complexer way to
create language users as 'subusers' even for newusers, but that's not what
I indended in the beginning.
Your solution is more elegant, in that it does away
with the problem
of namespace collisions, I guess.
But it could be very confusing for users in some cases?
I think we have enough helpful users, if there are some confused ones.
Please write me if I wrote things you don't understood, my english is not
so good, that I'm sure all the time I wrote all the right way. And
describing proposels without seeing questionmarks on the other face is
difficult.
--
Smurf
smurf(a)AdamAnt.mud.de
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