On Jan 22, 2008 12:27 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Sounds like a good and useful idea to me. "Oh, you're that guy from Wikipedia." People should be able to edit with the attribution being to an OpenID.
Well, maybe. At the very least, we should require a captcha for OpenID signups. Then they're not really any different, abuse-wise, from any signup (if you can write a script to auto-generate OpenIDs you can definitely write a script to auto-fill the username and password fields). We'd also want to require independent validation of the e-mail address, if the user provides one, unless the provider is trusted.
However, creating an OpenID account should be very easy, I think. Have a captcha and maybe a form for e-mail address. Although I guess we'd still have it in the usual place, and not (for instance) at the top of every edit page, since we don't seem to encourage signing up *too* much . . . why did we get rid of the old combined signup/login form again? tomgilder removed it in r11896 with no particular explanation. I rather liked it, it made MediaWiki signup far and away the easiest of any web software I had ever used. Now there's an extra click required.