User name rationalization is coming soon

[Kelly Martin]

The system was launched in half-baked in 2008. It's taken them seven years to get it working the way it should have been from the beginning. This is something to be proud of for WMF programmers!

Still, they're doing better than the Visual Editor!

Well, maybe not. SUL actually started in development around 2005-2006, same time frame as the Visual Editor actually.

By comparison, the IBM Watson project was conceptualized in 2004, an initial prototype (which could only answer Jeopardy questions correctly 15% of the time) debuted in 2006. The prototypes continued to improve to the point that in 2010, Watson could reliably defeat human opponents.

Of course, IBM has far more resources than WMF Engineering. But if IBM can create Watson in 6 years, surely the WMF can implement a centralized authentication system federated across homogenous systems in not more than the same period of time.... Right? Come on.

[Anroth]

Oddly enough, I know someone who worked on Watson (briefly, he was shuffled around a lot at IBM). He said they effectively threw infinite money at it behind the scenes.

When you have unlimited pockets, its a bit unfair to make those who dont compare. Even given the disparity in project scope.

Still, doesnt change the fact WMF should have done it in 3 years tops - given the amount of funds they did have available...

[Poetlister]

He said they effectively threw infinite money at it behind the scenes.

[Johnny Au]

The system was launched in half-baked in 2008. It's taken them seven years to get it working the way it should have been from the beginning. This is something to be proud of for WMF programmers!

Still, they're doing better than the Visual Editor!

Well, maybe not. SUL actually started in development around 2005-2006, same time frame as the Visual Editor actually.

By comparison, the IBM Watson project was conceptualized in 2004, an initial prototype (which could only answer Jeopardy questions correctly 15% of the time) debuted in 2006. The prototypes continued to improve to the point that in 2010, Watson could reliably defeat human opponents.

Of course, IBM has far more resources than WMF Engineering. But if IBM can create Watson in 6 years, surely the WMF can implement a centralized authentication system federated across homogenous systems in not more than the same period of time.... Right? Come on.

...and in 2011, Watson thought that Toronto is an American city. At the end though, it managed to defeat both Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter soundly.

[Vigilant]

The system was launched in half-baked in 2008. It's taken them seven years to get it working the way it should have been from the beginning. This is something to be proud of for WMF programmers!

Still, they're doing better than the Visual Editor!

Well, maybe not. SUL actually started in development around 2005-2006, same time frame as the Visual Editor actually.

By comparison, the IBM Watson project was conceptualized in 2004, an initial prototype (which could only answer Jeopardy questions correctly 15% of the time) debuted in 2006. The prototypes continued to improve to the point that in 2010, Watson could reliably defeat human opponents.

Of course, IBM has far more resources than WMF Engineering. But if IBM can create Watson in 6 years, surely the WMF can implement a centralized authentication system federated across homogenous systems in not more than the same period of time.... Right? Come on.

...and in 2011, Watson thought that Toronto is an American city. At the end though, it managed to defeat both Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter soundly.

It is. We just haven't filed paperwork for the 54th state of Canuckistan.

[Hex]

Still, doesnt change the fact WMF should have done it in 3 years tops - given the amount of funds they did have available...

If they hadn't launched it in a completely unsuitable state they could have done it in one.

[Vigilant]

Like all of these projects, they needed someone with real experience delivering working products to live customers.

There were many approaches to take to these problems, but the people in charge were just too weak to figure them out.

Here's a protip for the WMF: don't hire poor intern grade people off of IRC and put them into the organization as engineers...or managers...or community liaisons.

[The Adversary]

There were two unattached 'Carcharoth' accounts that meant the SUL for my username couldn't be finalised. One on fr.wiki and one on Commons.wiki. The French one is the one I got an e-mail about. That one has now been renamed (and the fr 'Carcharoth' is now unified into my SUL account):

https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... tagfilter=

The weird thing is that the one on Commons, who I think is the same user (at least he had a userbox on his fr.wiki userpage pointing to a Commons account called 'Carcharoth', so presumably it is the same user) hasn't been renamed yet.

I did try and find a record on-wiki somewhere of the renaming requests to see if the renaming request on Commons had been made and was waiting in a queue, but it seems the rename requests are made by filling in a form of some sort somewhere? Bit confusing, really. I do (or should) know my way around the wikis, and it took me a while to work out that it was safe to ignore the e-mail.

Exactly the opposite for me. I also have a SUL account name for all projects, except the French and commons, these last two were used by a French lady in 2007.

I just now found that I was logged in at commons with my main account (hurrah!)...but not at French wp. Well, I don´t speak French, anyway. *Very* convenient with direct access to commons, though.

It might have something to do with number of edits? The French lady who had my nick on commons had only made -1- edit there, but a dozen or so at French wp.

In any case; this whole project stinks of bad planning. The first thing they should have done, was to have made *all* new editors SUL-editors, and also automatically made all *old* editors with unique names SUL-editors.

That way; I would have been a SUL-editor by 2007, and this French lady would have had to find another nick for her handful of edits.

(Never got an email from WMF about this: I cannot have an email-address attached to my WP-account; I only get rape and murder-messages from young Jeremy H through it. A Steward contacted me on my talk-page, and told me the process. That actually worked well.)

[Carcharoth]

To be fair, it appears to be working OK.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.p ... Carcharoth

"03:49, 19 April 2015 Maintenance script (talk | contribs) renamed user Carcharoth (25 edits) to Carcharoth~commonswiki (SUL finalization)"

"13:10, 19 April 2015 User account Carcharoth (talk | contribs) was created automatically"

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spec ... ommonswiki
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spec ... Carcharoth

All seems OK.

Now I just have to put in a request for a merge between my 'Carcharoth (Commons)' and 'Carcharoth' accounts. Done. Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong!

[Carcharoth]

Seems to have worked, for me at least. Wonder if this will turn out to be a success story for the WMF. I can't wait to see the new features they will roll out once Single User Login is universal. (I'm only being slightly sarcastic there, I am sure some of the new features will be very useful.)

[The Adversary]

Seems to have worked, for me at least. Wonder if this will turn out to be a success story for the WMF. I can't wait to see the new features they will roll out once Single User Login is universal. (I'm only being slightly sarcastic there, I am sure some of the new features will be very useful.)

As of yesterday; me too!
It is great not to have to log out of my en.wp, wipe all cookies, & then log into my commons-account, etc.

Now, I hope they can merge my commons-account into my SUL-account.....I have about 1500 pages watch-listed on my commons-account (I´ve had it since 2008), hope they get transferred to my SUL-account?

[Carcharoth]

It was the password and preferences I was more worried about. But then I realised it was silly to worry about that. I made the two passwords the same and I think the preferences that were kept were for the 'main' account (the one into which the other one was being merged). Except they didn't use the merge tool. They shuffled things around, as detailed here. I think they were able to do that because it was only one account to move around and I'd not cross-polluted the editing by using the Commons account on multiple wikis (that became a SUL account at some point last year).

Attributions of photos uploaded before the change is another matter. That was initially thought to be a deal-breaker, but presumably some legal mind said it wasn't. I think someone here (Vigilant) thinks otherwise? In my case, the previous 'Carcharoth' uploaded only 15 images, so hopefully won't ever be a problem in practice. Those images are here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.p ... lshowall=1

It was that image of some rock concert that kept appearing next to my name on the mobile interface... I wonder which image appears there now? [Rather disappointingly, no image at all.]

[Hex]

The system was launched in half-baked in 2008. It's taken them seven years to get it working the way it should have been from the beginning.

Seems that it took them four years to even get to that point. Total time spent on this issue: eleven years. Now compare that to how other web applications have evolved since 2004.

[Vigilant]

The system was launched in half-baked in 2008. It's taken them seven years to get it working the way it should have been from the beginning.

Seems that it took them four years to even get to that point. Total time spent on this issue: eleven years. Now compare that to how other web applications have evolved since 2004.

I can't even laugh at this it's so very, very stupid.

[Hex]

Mod note: diversion about Grawp split to here.

[tarantino]

This has lead to some amusing user talk page posts, signed by wmf staff.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Oops I Crapped My Pants. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Oops I Crapped My Pants~enwiki that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name. If you think you might own all of the accounts with this name and this message is in error, please visit Special:MergeAccount to check and attach all of your accounts to prevent them from being renamed.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours,
Keegan Peterzell
Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation

01:56, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

[EricBarbour]

Damn, that's a good one......

[Hex]

Left hand, right hand.

Remember kids,

Once finalization is complete, every account on Wikimedia projects will be unique in all projects.

Just don't expect any copies of your edits to be attached to it.

Total time spent on this issue: eleven years.

Looks like the clock's still ticking. And, as a comment on my bug report notes, this problem had already been reported. Eight years ago.

What a product! What a team!

[auriental]

Left hand, right hand.

Remember kids,

Once finalization is complete, every account on Wikimedia projects will be unique in all projects.

Just don't expect any copies of your edits to be attached to it.

Total time spent on this issue: eleven years.

Looks like the clock's still ticking. And, as a comment on my bug report notes, this problem had already been reported. Eight years ago.

What a product! What a team!

Whomsoever said technicians were not capable of high humour? (uncontrollable )

[Hex]

Talking to people about this, I've found documentation for the structure of the revisions table in the database. Each revision's author's database ID and user name are stored in it. Normalization? What's that?

[The Joy]

I'm confused. Are they giving up on Single-User-Logins and going back to requiring the old way of having to register for every Wikimedia site?

[Vigilant]

I'm confused. Are they giving up on Single-User-Logins and going back to requiring the old way of having to register for every Wikimedia site?

Flip a fucking coin with the WMF 'engineering' team.

[Hex]

I'm confused. Are they giving up on Single-User-Logins and going back to requiring the old way of having to register for every Wikimedia site?

Nope. What I'm saying is, the table in the database that contains page revisions predates all that. Each entry, in addition to having the timestamp, content, etc., has the user's name and internal ID in it. This means it's not in second normal form. It should only have the user's ID, and the user name should live in another table, with the ID as the key. So the case now is that due to ancient fuckups a decade ago, some revisions have mismatched user names and user IDs associated with them, or even no ID at all. And the IDs aren't visible to end users, just the user names - those are what critical tools like Special:Contributions rely upon. I keep identifying these messes and having to ask people with database access to correct them, rather than the database having not been designed by a buffoon and thus preventing them from being possible in the first place.

Plus, what my earlier post linking to that bug report was referring to is that there's a tool which lets you clone revisions from one wiki to another. But it was built before the rationalization. Its "solution" to avoiding the possibility of edits by a remote user being attributed to a local user with the same name (when that situation was still possible) was to set the user ID to 0 while retaining the user name. Meaning that the revision would display a user name, but not actually be tied to a local account by that name. In other words, a shitty kludge. And somehow, in all this miserably drawn-out period of work to unify accounts, that was never addressed. Every time someone uses it, it creates revisions that don't contain the IDs of the marvellous new unique accounts that are such a great WMF Engineering achievement. The whole system is just a rabbit hole of stupid.

[lilburne]

The whole system is just a rabbit hole of stupid.

That adequately sums up the entirety of wiklipedia.