This is a real issue for people who have registered with a username having
UNICODE and non ASCII (7 bits) characters and who want to login to Wikipedia
when they are abroad with a simple English keyboard and want to edit some pages
(usually English pages).

The fact that Wikipedia and Mediawikis do not offer the possibility to
authenticate with an e-mail is now considered, at least for me, as a bug.

I recently discussed this fact on Wikitech-l ("Great idea"
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-February/058183.html) and
some tests have been made trying to answer legitimate questions (see
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-February/058253.html) to a
simple patch that I proposed.

This small patch in User.php (function idFromName) is enough in most cases:

        $dbr = wfGetDB( DB_SLAVE );
        $s = $dbr->selectRow( 'user', array( 'user_id' ), array( 'user_name' =>
$nt->getText() ), __METHOD__ );

        if ( $s === false ) {
          //Start Patch $result = null;
          $stwo = $dbr->selectRow( 'user', array( 'user_id' ), array(
'user_email' => $nt->getText() ), __METHOD__ );
          if ( $stwo === false ) {
            $result = null;
          }else {
            $result = $stwo->user_id;
          }
          //End Patch
        } else {
            $result = $s->user_id;
        }
The modified Login form is:

Username (or e-mail): |___________________|
Password:             |___________________| 

The full attached patch is rendering this new form in about 20 languages (that
is what we need in our wikis). The patch is simply adding two new msg: 
- 'yournameoremail' instead of 'yourname' in Userlogin.php and 
- 'passwordreset-usernameoremail' instead of 'passwordreset-username' in
SpecialPasswordReset.php .

In order to explain this new experimental feature, we added a Hook in
LocalSettings.php : 

function efLoginFormMessage( &$template ) {
   $template->set( 'header', "NEW (experimental): if you are a registered user
with an authenticated e-mail, you can also log in with your e-mail address in
place of your username. Your e-mail is used only during the authentication
phase; if successful you will be logged with your standard username. <br
/>Please notice that for people owning different accounts with the same e-mail,
you will be logged in with your first registered username (lowest ID). If the
password entered doesn't match the password of your lowest registered ID, you
can't authenticate this way and should enter your desired username.");
        return true;
}
$wgHooks['UserLoginForm'][]='efLoginFormMessage';

I hope that this patch will be visited and accept. It is changing our live
here. People having been registered with accented characters or in Cyrillic can
use their e-mail to get their temporary password by e-mail while still being
able to sign authorship in Cyrillic or with accented characters avoiding the
English transliteration. Others still prefer the English transliteration, it is
a question of taste.

Without this patch, people are using the English transliteration for the
commodity of authentication.

Regards,