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Is there any way to unify the Home Pages of a person across wikis? OnceAndOnlyOnce?? and all that? -- TedErnst

Rather than a homepage, I think a link to a blog is more likely to provide a current and evolving profile. -- AndyRoberts

That idea motivates AggregatorPages. -- ChrisPurcell

The ideas that I have had about this subject are:

MyFrontLawnOnTheInformationSuperHighway? - a my FrontLawn, a PeopleWiki?. WikiIndex is a little like that.
The distributed nature of wiki leads to and individualised perspective though. So LocalNames? works very well for that. If on every wiki that I want to participate in, I could add [MarkDilley] then every MarkDilley on that wiki points to my wiki.

Maybe the way to think about it, is that new folks for would be directed to MFLOTISH - then InterWiki links could be used, until LocalNames? takes ahold. Mflotish:MarkDilley

ProWiki can solve the problem through AutoLinkStrategies, WikiNet and MultiLinking. One Wiki would have homepages, a server network distributes all kind of page information. Wikis generate links to external wiki. We have this already running between CoForum and two servers of WikiService. -- HelmutLeitner

Have a HomepageWiki? of HomePages, with both a FrontLawn and a PIM, with InterWiki links to other wiki communities (e.g. Frontlawn:RealName, etc).

Use ProWiki?
HOMEPAGEWIKI.* is available!
FRONTLAWNWIKI.* is available!

There are a lot of issues with any namespace injection (see NearLink), but homepages are particularly volatile. What expectations do we have of a name? Here on MB, they have to be real. In wider use, they can be arbitrary, but obscenity is rarely tolerated, for instance. Do we force real names on this hypothetical wiki? How do we solve username conflicts? How about conflicts between weird names in the homepage wiki and regular pages on MB (or wherever)? Homepages serve a useful purpose on MB's RecentChanges; how can we keep that purpose without being swamped by changes to people who aren't a member of the MB community? Fundamentally, do we really want to inject "all names" into MB's pattern language?

If this hypothetical wiki supported namespace fragmentation (e.g. PeerGroups), the problem would be easier. If you want to join the MB community, you label your HomepageWiki? page appropriately, and bam! Instant membership. Your page gets inserted in the MB pattern language, and onto MB's RC. You can also label your page as being part of many communities; you only have to satisfy a community's expectations, such as RealNames, if you join it. (Username conflicts are still a problem.)

Sorry if this sounds like creating a huge bunch of problems before the idea's even got off the ground, but this kind of cross-wiki namespacing issue interests me :) -- ChrisPurcell

How can we keep that purpose without being swamped by changes to people who aren't a member of the MB community?

If we set up a NearLink, how do we ensure only RealNames are valid? Otherwise, all the BrokenLinks on MB could end up pointing at the homepages of people who chose silly nicknames — not a great user experience. I'm also interested in maintaining the current state of RecentChanges, namely that changes to a user's HomePage shows up on MB's RC. If homepages are actually on a different site, how do we maintain that community link? My suggestion is to allow individual pages on this HomepageWiki? to be tagged as being MB-related, and import only those as part of a NearLink and RecentNearChanges?. -- ChrisPurcell

It seems to me the connection to WikiPassport is quite powerful if we combine the idea with OpenID [1]. -- SunirShah

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