On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 14:40:19 -0800 (PST), Brion Vibber vibber@aludra.usc.edu wrote:
I wasn't aware of that, because I'm not aware of it being stated clearly anywhere (the login page would be a good place!).
I'll add a note.
Thanks!
Is that why there are no links from the english wiki to meta.wikipedia.org?
I'm not quite sure what you mean -- there are numerous links to meta from the main page, recentchanges, and various other places.
It took 30 seconds but I found it (the main page is rather, um, link rich)
This raises another question: What provision is there to prevent someone else grabbing my wikipedia.en username on the meta wiki and appearing to be me? Or to prevent me registering as, say, Susan Mason on meta?
The same thing that prevents someone else from grabbing your wikipedia.en username on slashdot.org or yahoo.com: politeness and/or lack of interest in doing so.
But I would never expect the latter with other sites. However, the separation between wikis is not at all evident to the newcomer. Indeed, my first assumption was of a single user database across all wikipedia entities.
While we are discussing log-ins, what is the expiry time for keeping logged in status? It seems to be rather short - only an hour or so. While I don't necessarily want to use cross-session cookies, it would be nice to stay logged in for an entire browser session. Sometimes I find that I have edited an article anonymously because my login has expired in the meantime. One option could be to default to session-long logins but to have a checkbox "this is a public computer" which would introduce a 30 or 60 minute limit.