[Foundation-l] Design goals for the election and board selection process

[Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)]

Confirming the email address allows users to more easily contact us,
which is necessary given our public function. It also ties our
hundreds of user accounts together for automated merging, in case
unified login ever gets implemented. Remember that these are permanent
accounts that are sometimes used to perform high-profile
administrator, bureaucrat, checkuser, or oversight duties.

Registering random user names is not practical. When processing a
request, we must first assign the necessary user rights on that wiki.
For example, I would assign rights to "Pathoschild at fawiki" if a
steward admin/bureaucrat/checkuser/oversighter was needed on the
Persian Wikipedia. This is easy if the usernames are the same, since
we just assign the rights to our username appended with the database
prefix. If the user name is random, however, we must first either look
up which random string we used on that wiki, or register a new random
user name.

Although getting a developer with shell access to register accounts
globally would work, I don't think many would be willing. Even if this
service was strictly limited to stewards, that would include 30 users.

Yours cordially,
Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)


On 7/18/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> Why does the email have to be confirmed in the first place?  Can't the
> account be created without an email address?  I can't imagine the time
> savings is as significant as you're making it out to be, and there are
> lots of ways to solve this problem which don't involve having the same
> username on all wikis.
>
> In fact, the username is irrelevant.  A faster way to resolve the
> problem would be:
>
> *Notice that the request exists
> *Create an account with a random username and no email address
> *The finally he can give himself the needed rights.