Hi,
In the last few months I was involved in a few editing workshops for new users. When we told people to create user accounts, they often chose usernames based on relatively common people's names, but it usually didn't happen in wikis in major language like English or Russian, so their username was accepted, as there were no other user with the same name on the same wiki. But when they entered a wiki in another major language, they had to create a new account with a different name for the obvious reasons.
How hard would it be to auto-convert to SUL all the accounts with names that exist only on one wiki, so it would appear like this name is already taken? This should prevent such problems in the future.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 11:23 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
In the last few months I was involved in a few editing workshops for new users. When we told people to create user accounts, they often chose usernames based on relatively common people's names, but it usually didn't happen in wikis in major language like English or Russian, so their username was accepted, as there were no other user with the same name on the same wiki. But when they entered a wiki in another major language, they had to create a new account with a different name for the obvious reasons.
How hard would it be to auto-convert to SUL all the accounts with names that exist only on one wiki, so it would appear like this name is already taken? This should prevent such problems in the future.
See the prior thread (which I think had no resolution): http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-April/060256.html
-Jeremy
On 29/07/12 17:23, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Hi,
In the last few months I was involved in a few editing workshops for new users. When we told people to create user accounts, they often chose usernames based on relatively common people's names, but it usually didn't happen in wikis in major language like English or Russian, so their username was accepted, as there were no other user with the same name on the same wiki. But when they entered a wiki in another major language, they had to create a new account with a different name for the obvious reasons.
How hard would it be to auto-convert to SUL all the accounts with names that exist only on one wiki, so it would appear like this name is already taken? This should prevent such problems in the future.
I thought it was already that way, that the username would have been reserved even if it wasn't unified. The names should be at globalnames and no manual account creation with that name should be possible. Can you provide some examples?
Thanks
2012/7/29 Platonides Platonides@gmail.com:
On 29/07/12 17:23, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Hi,
In the last few months I was involved in a few editing workshops for new users. When we told people to create user accounts, they often chose usernames based on relatively common people's names, but it usually didn't happen in wikis in major language like English or Russian, so their username was accepted, as there were no other user with the same name on the same wiki. But when they entered a wiki in another major language, they had to create a new account with a different name for the obvious reasons.
How hard would it be to auto-convert to SUL all the accounts with names that exist only on one wiki, so it would appear like this name is already taken? This should prevent such problems in the future.
I thought it was already that way, that the username would have been reserved even if it wasn't unified. The names should be at globalnames and no manual account creation with that name should be possible. Can you provide some examples?
http://toolserver.org/~quentinv57/tools/sulinfo.php?username=LaPhilosophe
As this page shows, this account existed only in enwiki since 2007. Accounts in hewiki and ptwiki were created a few days ago.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
On 29/07/12 18:48, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
As this page shows, this account existed only in enwiki since 2007. Accounts in hewiki and ptwiki were created a few days ago.
Commit to fix that: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/16922
I suppose the change is ok, but some old users with shared usernames which are not unified will be forced to use a second username when they currently are not and they're not disturbing each other, because each of them is active only in a single language. Old users are mostly inactive nowadays and new users must be preferred over them, so we can live with it. Will bureaucrats be allowed to rename users to globally "taken" usernames, as a last resort? If you need an example consider the username I had on some it projects: https://toolserver.org/~pathoschild/stalktoy/?target=Nemo, mosly registered before 2006. en, es, pl are still active and pl registered his last pl account only two months ago.
Nemo
On 30/07/12 07:22, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
I suppose the change is ok, but some old users with shared usernames which are not unified will be forced to use a second username when they currently are not and they're not disturbing each other, because each of them is active only in a single language. Old users are mostly inactive nowadays and new users must be preferred over them, so we can live with it. Will bureaucrats be allowed to rename users to globally "taken" usernames, as a last resort? If you need an example consider the username I had on some it projects: https://toolserver.org/~pathoschild/stalktoy/?target=Nemo, mosly registered before 2006. en, es, pl are still active and pl registered his last pl account only two months ago.
Nemo
Yes, it only affects account creation, not renaming.
I didn't consider this usecase, but I guess that only allowing to register new ones to the one which could claim the SUL account (after he does) makes sense.
I this case you mention, I think the SUL account would belong to eswiki (which seems the same as commons), with ~7500 edits. The it user could have claimed it, but was renamed around the time of SUL implementation.
PS: plwiki account has no edits, there's a recent plwikt one, though.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org