There's a conceptual problem with the way imports are handled by Special:Import:
Users are solely identified by their name, which may lead to mis-attributing
edits. Consider user Foo contributes to page Quux on wiki A. The page is then
moved to wiki B. Now, three cases are possible:
- If user Foo exist on wiki B, and is the same person, all is fine.
- If user Foo exist on wiki B, and is a DIFFERENT person, the edits are
mis-attributed, both in the page history and in Special:Contributions.
- If user Foo does not exist on wiki B, edits are still attributed to that
username, both in the page history and in Special:Contributions. Anyone who
comes along can claim those edits for him/herself by creating an account called
Foo - which again would mis-represent authorship. This may happen intentionally
or not, it's bad in both cases.
I noticed this problem when seeing pages that I contributed to on
meta.wikimedia.org being moved to mediawiki.org; I did not have an account there
- I created one, claiming the contributions for myself. But a lot of people are
bound not to know about this. Also, if pages from meta or commons, where I
(Duesentrieb) have an account, where to be imported into the english wikipedia,
this would cause them to be attributed to [[en:User:Duesentrieb]], who is NOT me.
I expect this problem to go away for Wikimedia projects once we get single
sign-on. But perhaps we should wait with large-scale interwiki moves until that
time. Also, other users thould be advised of this problem, and perhaps
Special:Import and the command line import scripts should show a warning about
this too. Ideally, there should be a way to supply a fixed mapping of user
names, or a prefixing/suffixing pattern.
Version: 1.9.x
Severity: major