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

[Anthony]

On 7/18/07, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild) <pathoschild at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
The email address could always be confirmed later in emergency
situations, though.

> 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.
>
I'm sorry I mentioned it.  I should have just left it at the fact that
the few seconds it takes to create the account isn't that big of a
deal.

> 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.
>
It's certainly an easier script to write than full blown single
username unification, or whatever the heck it's called (I'm not
looking it up).  It wouldn't even have to be strictly limited to
stewards.  The only part I'm taking issue with is "there are some
cases where accounts will need to be renamed".

I'm certainly not going to agree to rename my en username.  If it
happens it'll happen forcibly.  Now in my particular case I doubt
there are any other Anthony DiPierro's on other wikis with over 16,799
edits, but I guarantee you some other active users are going to have
names that collide.