[Foundation-l] On hard-to-read usernames

[Titoxd@Wikimedia]

Well, it can be made in a way that the link appears only in special
circumstances. Assuming that my home wiki is commons, it would show up as
Greg suggests:

* Titoxd ([[:commons:User:Titoxd|John Doe]] | Talk | contribs | block) m
(reverted edits by Titoxd (talk) to last version by Brion VIBBER)

But that would occur if someone were seeing a diff I made on the Spanish
Wikipedia, for example. On commons, it could just show up like this:

* Titoxd (John Doe | Talk | contribs | block) m (reverted edits by Titoxd
(talk) to last version by Brion VIBBER)

That would minimize the amount of cross-wiki jumping, and make it clearer to
the end user, I believe.

As to having impersonation problems: well, I one way to avoid them would be
to sanitize the nickname or real name field, disallowing all wikitext and
links; then, the software would automatically fill out the defined home
wiki, and prevent the user from doing so. Or, if it gets really bad and
people want to stop me from saying that my name is "Gregory Maxwell" in my
nickname field, the field could be hidden from view by default, and users
would have to follow the current method of writing it on their raw signature
manually. Another option is to forcefully hide the nickname field of
offenders, but that seems unnecessary, IMO. 

Titoxd.

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gregory Maxwell
Sent: Sunday, December 24, 2006 1:55 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] On hard-to-read usernames

On 12/24/06, Titoxd at Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> This could be coupled with an option to declare a home wiki somewhere
(e.g.
> so Anthere can put her home wiki as [[:foundation:]] if she desires), but
> that could be optional. The reason I say it would be a good idea is that
the
> data is going to be collected anyways during the migration, and instead of
> it being thrown out after SUL work is done, it could be put into some use
by
> perhaps adding a line of code or two. ;)

How about we just combine ideas here.. Allow the preferred name field
to also have a user specified internal link to any of our projects?
Same data could be made part of the default signature.

* Titoxd ([[:commons:User:Titoxd|John Doe]] | Talk | contribs | block)
m (reverted edits by Titoxd
(talk) to last version by Brion VIBBER)

(obviously clickable and not wikitext)

The problem with this is that would allow for some sneaky behavior
that we'd have to deal with. (i.e. people claiming to be someone that
they are not)  So an alternative would be to make the username field
clickable, and have a user field that indicates which wiki the link
will take them to... If we're going to have a join against the user
table to obtain a prefered name, it would be easy enough to grab a
homewiki id to use for the userlink. ...

Although, do we really want userlinks randomly wisking you off to another
wiki?
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