Re: proposed policy for user names on W3C wikis

Thomas Roessler <tlr@w3.org> writes:
> On 2007-11-27 20:59:34 -0500, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> 
> > This "policy" will be adopted on a WG by WG basis.  I expect
> > OWL will adopt it, and others are free to follow it or come
> > up with something different. 
> 
> > Thoughts?   Concerns?
> 
> "Pick a user name and passwod; let your Team Contact know what
> the user name is, so he can add you to the ACL.  Typical Wiki
> User names have the form FirstnameLastname." seems to have
> worked pretty well in the groups that I'm dealing with; not
> sure a policy of any length is called for.

That was our original policy, more or less, but change was motivated by
several factors:

    - People for whom FirstnameLastname is confusing, hard to parse,
      or just seems quite unlike their name:
              Christian de Sainte Marie
              Peter Patel-Schneider
    - Questions about using unicode:
              Markus Krötzsch 
    - That wikipedia does not use WikiNames
    - The desire to have the working group documents in the wiki be
      generally high quality, perhaps ready for publication, and 
      therefore using a suitable, publishable form of people's names

> I agree that it would be great to be able to get along without
> maintaining a separate ACL and a separate set of user names and
> passwords.
> 
> However, it's not at all clear to me that OpenId is the
> solution to that problem, in particular since it doesn't solve
> the "connect a Wiki's write ACL with DBWG" part. I actually
> suspect that the cost of connecting our wikis to the usual ACL
> system might be (possibly significantly) lower.

How would you suggest doing it?   

The idea with OpenId is that w3.org will publish (perhaps access
controlled) the OpenIds of everyone in each group.  Then any other
service, eg the Wiki's, can query that list and use it as they like.
It's an open, decentralized, fairly straight-forward approach -- if
everyone is okay with using OpenIds.  

      - Sandro

Received on Wednesday, 28 November 2007 12:17:37 UTC