Thanks John for your comment. It would mean that people logging with an email will have a default account (lowest ID with the same email or whatever rule).

For authorship Wikimedia doesn't encourage multiple account names (multiple (>3?) pseudos are blamed). And usually, for a corporate wiki you don't have multiple accounts. If you decide to change your name for any reason (divorce for example) you are supposed to have a (new) unique name. You usually can also have email aliases.

And if you want to log on a specific account name, you can copy and paste your account name (if your keyboard doesn't allow you to enter your real, not transliterated, name).

Thus, I am not sure that it is strong objection for corporate wikis at least.

PS: I am trying to understand how to have a working MyAuthPlugin.php and to get the email in authenticate but it requires time and I haven't found so many examples on the Web.

Any hint or comment is welcome.

Nicolas

Le 13 févr. 2012 à 19:20, John Du Hart a écrit :

Right now users are allowed to link multiple accounts to the same email, so (unless that's a configuration option) it would need to be fixed to ensure that emails are unique.

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Nicolas Brouard INED brouard@ined.fr wrote:

...

Hi again,

I am reformulating my (unanswered yet) question: would it be useful and easy on a standard mediawiki site or even on wikipedia sites, to allow login authentication by not only offering the unique pair (user_name; user_password) but also the pair (user_email; user_password)?

Some pro arguments are that:

• email addresses are transliterated and can be entered easily on any keyboard
• Unicode user_name can be entered once (at registration) in Cyrillic or Arabic or Chinese or French in a way that authors can choose. With Unicode, English transliteration of authorship is no more mandatory and may be unattractive if your text has to be read locally.

Some cons are:

• how to change the PHP code (I am confused with authplugin.php squelettes) for authentication and HTML of Special:UserLogin by adding the mail address:

Username (or mail address): |___________________| Password: |___________________|

• is there any security issue in allowing both options?
• is there any other code to alter?

Many thanks for any hint (or code)?

Nicolas

Le 10 févr. 2012 à 17:18, Nicolas Brouard INED a écrit :

...

Hi,

We are managing Demopaedia.org, a site which aims to give access to old and recent versions of the Multilingual Demographic Dictionary (United Nations since 1958). About 15 languages are already available in the first (en-i.demopaedia.org/wiki/10) or second edition (en-ii.demopaedia.org/wiki/10).

A secondary aim is to open an encyclopedia (en.demopaedia.org) on the Scientific Study of Population, based on the corpus of terms already validated by the dictionary.

Based on mediawiki (1.16 moving to 1.18), the site is a corporate site. People allowed to edit need to sign under their professional real name. Currently their login name (user_name) is their real name (not a pseudo), sometimes transliterated without accent and in roman characters (but not always, see Михаил Денисенко on http://ru-ii.demopaedia.org/w/index.php?title=90&action=history). Their e-mail address is also mandatory.

I would like to change their login process by entering their e-mail address as a login and having their real name in the history as well as for authorship. The simplest way could be that the user_name, user_real_name and user_email fields are kept intact, but the login process is authenticated by the e-mail address, keeping the same password that they have entered. Thus people could have a unalterable user_name (given by me), a user_real_name which could have accents or whatever and an e-mail address that they could change.

And here is my question, how can I do this and do I need any of the extensions like Realnames, PageHistoryRealnames, ShowRealUsernames etc.

I spent some time googling but didn't find an easy solution.

Many thanks for any hint.

Nicolas

Nicolas Brouard INED brouard@ined.fr

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Nicolas Brouard INED brouard@ined.fr

Thanks to Platonides for his comment and also to Olivier (the author of the Realnames extension) who told me to forward the following patch to wikitech-l (which I just subscribed to) for advices, comments and critics.

I was just wondering if this small patch in User.php (function idFromName) was 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; }

Then, just try to enter your e-mail on a standard wiki in place of your username and you will be authenticated to the first ID (and user_name) having your e-mail.

The importance of e-mails as a simple way to authenticate on modern sites can't be ignored.

If you want to enter your standard username for authentication you can do it too.

But if your username is not a Roman but an Arabic, Thai, Japanese etc. username or even a French username with accents and if you decided to have authorship recognized in your own language and not only in a English transliterated way, you can also do it with as standard mediawiki installation. But if you are working with somebody who has an English keyboard only, the copy-paste of your Unicode username may be tedious and you would prefer to enter your e-mail address.

The modified Login form could be:

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

If someone could test this patch above and report the security issues as well as performances, it could be great for us.

We are managing Demopaedia.org and are willing to open the site to professional demographers (being already subscribed to a national or international union for the scientific study of population). We will not use various LDAP authentication processes but use local standard mediawiki databases. The usual way to be authenticated is the e-mail and password, and we want to keep this option. If you look (for example) at the work of Mikael, his work is authored in Cyrillic: Михаил Денисенко on http://ru-ii.demopaedia.org/w/index.php?title=90&action=history, other Russian authors use the transliteration. It is a question of taste.

If Mikael is traveling and doesn't have a Cyrillic keyboard, he would be pleased to enter his email to authenticate. The password to be entered is the password linked with his username.

For people having multiple usernames (pseudos) with the same e-mail but different passwords for each, a better patch could be to test the password entered and to link with the unique username. But I am not an expert in mediawiki and php and don't know how to get the password within the function idFromName.

I understand that e-mails should not be revealed and the above patch satisfies this condition.

Comments, advices, critics, code are welcome.

Nicolas

Le 15 févr. 2012 à 23:57, Platonides a écrit :

On 13/02/12 19:56, Nicolas Brouard INED wrote:

...

Thanks John for your comment. It would mean that people logging with an email will have a default account (lowest ID with the same email or whatever rule).

For authorship Wikimedia doesn't encourage multiple account names (multiple (>3?) pseudos are blamed). And usually, for a corporate wiki you don't have multiple accounts. If you decide to change your name for any reason (divorce for example) you are supposed to have a (new) unique name. You usually can also have email aliases.

And if you want to log on a specific account name, you can copy and paste your account name (if your keyboard doesn't allow you to enter your real, not transliterated, name).

Thus, I am not sure that it is strong objection for corporate wikis at least.

PS: I am trying to understand how to have a working MyAuthPlugin.php and to get the email in authenticate but it requires time and I haven't found so many examples on the Web.

Any hint or comment is welcome.

Nicolas

I don't think you can do that with just an auth plugin. You would need to modify the SpecialUserLogin code to look for that email.

PS: What's the big issue with copy&paste or transliteration? Doesn't your users have a keyboard layout able to type *their own name*? I understand the issue when a third party needs to enter them, but eg. Russian people usually have/can switch to a cyrillic keyboard layout.

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