LDan wrote:
That's a good idea, but aren't there some big
technical problems with merging everything (except
for
the mailing lists)? For example, what if there are
two
different pictures with the same name? ....
That is a very valid point. And in fact there are many
hundreds of these, but most are exact copies. It would
probably be easier to use the largest image database
(en.wikipedia's images and other media files) as a
base, add then add all the others. For name conflicts
we could ignore anything that is exactly the same size
and use the en.wikipedia version (since it is probably
exactly the same photo). All other name conflicts will
have to be fixed manually. We have already had to do
similar manual work when we disallowed external image
display on en.wikipedia. That wasn't too painful or
time-consuming.
The same goes for logins.
Most of the duplicate logins will either be from the
same person or from a person who is no longer active
(most of whom just created the account and never made
more than 10 edits). We can make the job easier by
auto-exiring all user accounts that have made fewer
than 10 edits after say 120 days of inactivity. That
should clear many thousands of user names and thus
prevent many conflicts. We could even have a 100 edit
/ one year auto-expiration to clear out even more user
names.
And why would merging logins fix the problem of
people not going to the right wiki?
I didn't claim that. But it would reduce the threshold
needed to participate as a logged-in user across
wikis. Not having to deal with separate logins would
tend to encourage more cross-wiki work.
Oh, and the name should not preclude non-image files.
files.wikimedia.org or the slightly odd but more sexy
multimedia.wikimedia.org would work better.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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