Oh, yes, that does help! Or at least it explains what’s going on.

I do have the name I want on Phabricator and on Gerrit/dev too, and I do own it on MediaWiki.org too, but I won’t get the unified Wikimedia name.

Unfortunately, I still don’t have a solution for my problem. I tried to acquire the global account by requesting a username change but it got declined because one other user has an “overarching claim” on the name. I tried to contact that user (who has been mostly inactive since 2012) via email, but didn’t hear anything back. As far as I am aware, the person who has the “highest” user rights and highest edit count gets the name, but is the status as a core developer not relevant too? Can you do anything about it, so I can keep the name I have almost everywhere else?

Yes, I’m working on having the stewards resolve my own problem. But that only applies to me. I fear that others in a similar situation as me, but without knowledge about the developer account system, will be a bit lost when they try to sign up for Phabricator. I mean, the “LDAP Username/Password” prompt is quite intimidating, whereas the nice “Login with MediaWiki” button seems a lot simpler. But then users without a global account just get such an error:

I don’t know when the SUL finalization is supposed to happen (couldn’t find any up-to-date ETA) but until it happens, non-developers will essentially have no way of getting into Phabricator. Since the Bugzilla merge is supposed to happen this month, that means that those users will have no way of contributing to bug reports until the SUL problems have been resolved and they are able to get a global account. I’m not sure if that is really acceptable for the Phabricator launch.