On Aug 13, 2007, at 10:00 PM, Anthony wrote:
To use an analogy, let's say I come up with a plan for Single Domain Name Resolution (SDNR). Forcing Wikipedia to register so many domain names (wikipedia.com/wikipedia.net/wikipedia.org/etc) is silly, so why not let them register one address for all. So under SDNR, we merge .com, .net, and .org. Companies register for one of the three addresses and they automatically get all three. There's no longer a need to type in "slashdot.com", I can just type in "slashdot". In case of any conflict, where two people picked the same second level domain name part, we look at how much traffic the various domain names get and whoever gets the most traffic gets all three domain names. Happiness.org (alexa rank 1,743,585) has 3 months to come up with a new domain name or we change it for them, to happiness-usurped.org. After all, Happiness.com (alexa rank 1,262,045) gets more traffic.
I'm not sure if I follow your analogy there, Anthony. Domain names have an importance almost akin to a trademark on the Internet, and companies use ridiculous amounts of resources for the upkeep of their domains and usurpation of any conflicting ones.
A Wikimedia username, on the other hand, is merely a unique identifier that identifies a person. Whether a user is named Tangotango or Tangomango, if the user behind the usernames is the same, then the quality of contributions from that account does not change.
Some may argue that a change in username reduces name recognition; however, countless users have successfully changed their on-wiki names to the point that the user rename is forgotten. There is really no inherent value in a Wikimedia username, like there is in a domain name.
You assert that "[SUL] forces good faith users to change their username". Sure, but that's only because we have a bad legacy of conflicting usernames on the 600 or so wikis we have, something that probably should not have been the case in the first place. Also, are that many "good faith users" actually affected? (Brion may have posted the figure somewhere before, but I can't find it right now.)
You also say that SUL will "[clog] up the username namespace even more than it already is". What username namespace? Do you mean the User: namespace on all wikis? The number of user pages certainly will not change with SUL; the number of people using a wiki will not change significantly just because of SUL. If you mean the number of registered users, the unified login script, as I understand it, does not go and automatically create an account on every single wiki for a particular user; in fact, by unifying preferences such as passwords and emails, it can be argued that SUL will actually *clean up* the user databases. It will be much less of a pain to change your email address, for example. However, I'm not going to pretend that I'm a SUL expert; I've only read through some of the documentation that Brion has provided.
In short, I don't really understand what long-term disadvantages SUL will bring to the Wikimedia universe; I can only see it as a positive (and logical) thing to do.
Cheers,
Tangotango