On Aug 14, 2007, at 12:00 AM, Anthony wrote:
I guess I just have to disagree. It does matter to me what my username is, and I think it matters to a lot of other people too.
I guess it's a matter of different values, and partly because you have a short, easy-to-remember username. :) However I think most people do tend to judge users by their contributions, rather than their username (unless it's very silly!).
I just don't think the problem you describe is enough reason to screw things up for all those people who don't have the problem. A globally unique numeric identifier is what should be the first step. Then all those features which are supposedly dependent on SUL can be implemented. In reality nothing is dependent on SUL.
Well, I agree it's not a huge problem, but it would certainly make a lot of people's lives easier. I don't think it would really screw things up for anybody - I've considered changing my username in the past, since it may be (and has been) confused with User:Tango, and having seen many people change their username recently, especially on the English Wikipedia, I have the feeling it hasn't taken them too much effort to do that.
As far as I've seen, none of the informed devs have told us that "XYZ is dependent on SUL". They've said "XYZ is made easier by SUL", but nothing about dependencies. My assumption is that they would just be reinventing the wheel if they implemented a global function (like global blocking), and then enabled SUL, so they've just elected not to do it until SUL is here. I would do the same in my own software; no programmer likes to write the same or similar code for two tasks if code can be shared between the two.
On the other hand, various people, on the mailing lists and Bugzilla, have told us that "XYZ is dependent on SUL". Most instances of these, as far as I know, are simply misinformed. So yes, I think you're right, nothing, besides SUL itself, is *dependent* on SUL.
SUL also has the potential to create confusion, when people are forced to change their longstanding username and all those urls to their user page suddenly point to someone else's user page.
I assume there are only going to be a few isolated cases where the username ABC is shared by person A on wiki 1 and person B on wiki 2, and both people have substantial contributions and are integral parts of their respective communities (User:Anthony is, as you cite, an example). There are probably going to be far fewer cases where person A is also an established member of wiki 2, or person B is an established member of wiki 1 (e.g., if you were an established member of both the English and French Wikipedias). In these cases, sure, confusion may arise; but it's not going to be too much of a hassle to put up a message on your user page asking users if they're looking for the right person, in these (probably) isolated cases.
Maybe SUL makes sense for admins, or at least for those admins who participate on multiple projects. Maybe it makes sense where there's no current conflict. Maybe it makes sense on a per-language basis.
I think it makes sense for anybody who participates in multiple projects (that includes, say, users who participate in both the English Wikipedia and Commons), whether an admin or not.
But I think en.wikipedia.User:Anthony and fr.wikipedia.User:Anthony should be able to get along. I'll probably win the eventual conflict between us, as fr.wikipedia.User:Anthony doesn't have very many edits, but I don't think there should have to be a winner. The two of us have gotten along perfectly fine without SUL.
In the grand scheme of things, far more users are going to benefit from being able to log in to Commons with their English Wikipedia accounts. I sympathize with the situation you are in, but I think this is more a technical thing than a who-gets-what-username thing.
I think it will slightly, because I think it's going to be bothered by it. But besides that, there's one thing that *is* adversely affecting our goals to provide free knowledge to the world, and that's the fact that every time some feature is brought up like global blocking or global talk page notification or global language preferences, it gets put on hold because "that won't happen until after SUL".
I wholeheartedly agree with you, especially with global blocking and the like, but as a person who programs, I sometimes have to put off badly-needed features for that "major redesign" myself, so I do realize nobody has bad intentions here. I don't think the devs are treating SUL as anything more than what it is (a nice new centralized backend to replace the currently higgledy-piggledy user accounts on Wikimedia wikis); most of the damage has been done by people who scream SUL for no good reason at all.
I personally think we should be looking at the Wikimedia projects from a long-term point of view; if we want the Wikimedia projects to be still available for the next generation, we should be thinking longer than the average Wikimedian's active length (mere months or sometimes a couple of years).
I think I am thinking from a long-term point of view, and frankly I don't see why you'd try to say I'm not.
Maybe I should have been clearer here, as well; I mean, it doesn't matter that much what today's users are going to experience in the changeover to SUL; if I, for example, had to change my username to Tangomango, and that caused a bit of inconvenience for me, it's not a big deal for Wikimedia, because the projects are still going to develop whatever the username of a lowly user like me happens to be.
However, future users will benefit far more than I will have been inconvenienced. Commons will also benefit from this, as the extra registration step for Commons will no longer be a hurdle for users. (Of course, that may increase the number of copyvios on Commons, but that's another matter.) So you might call it a sacrifice. Or an offering to the deity of future Wikimedians.
Fair enough. I'm keeping the domain name analogy in my toolbox for trying to convince others, because I think it's a good one, but I accept that it wasn't a good analogy to convince you of anything.
Sorry, perhaps I was a little pedantic about this. But I still do think the analogy deals with a far more serious subject than SUL, and has the potential to mislead people who hear your analogy to think of SUL as an apocalyptic being from hell, when it really isn't.
What I mean, in a nutshell, is that it's going to get 10 times harder for new users to pick a username.
True, but is that a problem?
It's a problem, but if it were the only problem I might overlook it. The major problem in my opinion is that SUL requires some people (let's say, more than 10 people) who have registered a username in good faith, to change that username.
We'll just have to disagree on this - I've stated my opinion above.
Cheers,
Tangotango