Wikimedia engineering March 2013 report

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This article was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision history and associated status pages. A wiki version is also available.

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“Continuing work on identifying accounts that have not been merged with Single User Login, with the goal of merging those accounts starting in April.”
Merging those accounts ? Depending on how it is done, this can be bad news or good news. Currently, the merging of accounts ingores the preferences. I refuse the merging of my accounts if such merging fails to take my prefs into the newly merged account. A contrario, if the merging takes the prefs I have set and has them applied and unified on all wikis, this would be great !
Thank you.

Hey,
When we said “merging” we meant that the local accounts on different wikis with the same name will turn into a single, global account, if they’re all from the same person.
We don’t currently have plans to create a tool that would merge accounts together. On the point about global preferences, there similarly aren’t any current plans for providing these (beyond the shared account name, e-mail and password that global accounts have).
Sorry for the confusion.

I love these reports. Keep up the good work.

Hello James, You can be sorry. The confusion is most to come. If I understand correctly, you are going to present one “unified” account with inconsistent prefs. So I will have one account. I set the prefs for it. Let’s say I set the history page to 500, and I disable the experimental features — which can have security implications. OK. It’s done. Fine. Then, one day, I go for the first time to the Tamil Wikipedia. My account is valid there, great ! And what are my prefs ? They are not what I have set ! I have the history page… Read more »

“Fresh, friendly instructions on reporting a technical problem”
Fresh and friendly ? Are you kidding ? Instructions for creating yet another account, and for struggling with the dinosaur Bugzilla ?