Same as everywhere, William Allen Simpson, of course! ;-) Years ago, some (most?) of us edited via various nicknames. I actually didn't bother to log in, but instead only had an account to "watch" changes. But circa 2005 -- wikipedia was getting bad press for accuracy at the time -- some of us made a mutual pact to use our real names. We hoped that it helped to have published authors as contributors. OTOH, I've also helped former college students obscure or remove their real names, as some firms still frown on association with wikipedia. On 3/10/11 12:18 PM, John wrote:

On 3/10/11 10:34 PM, William Allen Simpson wrote: To contrast, again I started from no cookies, logged in on en:, loaded a fr: page url, and I'm obviously logged in on fr:, too.

2011/3/11 Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com>om>: What I did find is that [[User:William Allen Simpson]] has an account on frwiki but not on dewiki. However, automatic account creation doesn't seem to be broken; I just visited a wiki where I didn't have an account (dewikiquote) and it was automatically created. Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

2011/3/11 William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson(a)gmail.com>om>: These are unrelated and harmless warnings. The majority of them /should/ in fact appear on en.wikipedia.org unless you're visiting a very old cached page as an anonymous user or something. Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

And just as an aside, I did find out why fr: stopped working for awhile. The message I left on a Talk was about "Fuck You!" (the song), and a censorship bot suspended my login there.... Somebody kindly fixed it. So far, fr: has worked fine since then.

On 3/11/11 6:23 PM, Platonides wrote: No idea. What I wrote in the first message was: # For example, after login to english, the french link seems to accept the # credentials (most of the time), while the german link *never* accepts the # credentials. At that point, I was remembering/thinking that fr: had not worked at least some of the time. But it's been no problem since. I'd no idea that things written on enwiki could be "transwikified". Amazing! Some of those are back in 2006, long time before unification. As I unified pretty early, most of those edits are after unification, but didn't get linked. How to fix this? The dewiki user page link is black (posting not allowed), while the Talk link looks possible. So, it's some kind of "limbo" user? http://toolserver.org/~vvv/sulutil.php?user=William+Allen+Simpson Doesn't show the dewiki edits, and so didn't unify (back in June 2008). It does show the "new" no edit accounts created by visiting their pages this past week. Database Project Editcount Registration date Flags Blocked SUL status commonswiki (c) commons 15 2009010711230711:23, 07 January 2009 0 No autocreated cswiki (c) wikipedia 0 2011030322492622:49, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated dawiki (c) wikipedia 0 2011031120221920:22, 11 March 2011 0 No autocreated enwikibooks (c) wikibooks 0 2011030312410912:41, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated enwikinews (c) wikinews 0 2011030312403912:40, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated enwiki (c) wikipedia 20292 2005111501061401:06, 15 November 2005 2Reviewer No home wiki enwikiquote (c) wikiquote 0 2011030312401112:40, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated enwikiversity (c) wikiversity 0 2011030312413012:41, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated enwiktionary (c) wiktionary 1 2008071813552913:55, 18 July 2008 0 No autocreated eswiki (c) wikipedia 0 2011031120222620:22, 11 March 2011 0 No autocreated frwiki (c) wikipedia 1 2011030322351522:35, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated hewiki (c) wikipedia 0 2011030322495122:49, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated itwiki (c) wikipedia 0 2011030322493722:49, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated metawiki (c) wikimedia 1 2009041413251313:25, 14 April 2009 0 No autocreated nlwiki (c) wikipedia 1 2009061507530907:53, 15 June 2009 0 No autocreated plwiki (c) wikipedia 0 2011031120304820:30, 11 March 2011 0 No autocreated ptwiki (c) wikipedia 0 2011030322501122:50, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated ruwiki (c) wikipedia 0 2009071517384217:38, 15 July 2009 0 No autocreated simplewiki (c) wikipedia 0 2011031120220820:22, 11 March 2011 0 No autocreated specieswiki (c) wikispecies 0 2011030312403312:40, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated sourceswiki (c) wikisource 0 2011030312414512:41, 03 March 2011 0 No autocreated mediawikiwiki (c) mediawiki 0 2009071905192205:19, 19 July 2009 0 No autocreated

On 3/12/11 9:03 AM, Casey Brown wrote: No, especially as I don't speak German. And I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that any attempt to create a new version of my same name would be rejected as centralauth will find the duplicate original name. It originally seemed to me this was more of an inter-site data sharing issue. Later information from Platonides leads me to think this is a software issue, that leads to an inconsistent database. How did transwikified edits not point back to the original site and user? How is some kind of user set up that isn't unifiable, or even findable with the SUL collision detector and MergeAccount tools? I'm sure I'm unlikely to be the only such instance? I'll try not to disturb the de variant data for William Allen Simpson, until some nice developer figures out the issue with the database....

On 3/12/11 7:23 PM, Platonides wrote: Tried a regular login via secure -- it worked, no errors, using: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Anmelde… Looking at the cookies, it automatically logged me into enwiki, too. And dewiki successfully finds the 27 old transwiki edits in the contributions (Benutzerbeiträge). Special:MergeAccount now sees dewiki. But the SUL tool doesn't see the old edits (that first 0 is editcount). dewiki (c) wikipedia 0 2011031317400117:40, 13 March 2011 0 No autocreated Oh, that sounds ugly! I seem to remember in the back of my mind an old bug report about adding inter-site information, I'll see whether I can find it. I thought that was done *before* unified login. Hmmm, it got us through the first decade.... Kinda reminds me why I stopped emailing as Bill Simpson almost 20 years ago, and went to my full name. (Worked from 1977 to 1991, much too common after the Internet got bigger. And DayDreamer was not going to work well at all!) Yes, to the latter. Also a security hole. I think I could take over some accounts. It simply doesn't keep enough information.

William Allen Simpson wrote: (...) You would be logged in if you used the secure meta link: http://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Help:Unified_login When you log into secure, you're logged in everywhere, but only on their secure version (that's done on purpose). Links between wikis taking you out of secure are a known problem (although I think enwiki has some javascript to reduce it). Sure they should. It's the open bug https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5440