Thank you very much for the reply Max, +1 beer for next time we meet.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 5:10 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Teresa Cho wrote:
I'm trying to add a feature to Wikimetrics that will allow users to create a cohort with a username and find all accounts across wikis. I want to use the CentralAuth database, because as far as I can tell, it stores the global username and all the local usernames. However, I don't see where it connects the globalusers to the localusers. Is it just the username?
Does the username have to be the same across local wikis and you query the localuser table with what you think is the global username? If that's the case, I suppose I don't need to look at the global table.
Hi.
Broadly, I think the answer for you're looking for is no: CentralAuth accounts (global user accounts that match to local user accounts) are not fully unified on Wikimedia wikis. It's a long-term goal, but it's a disruptive change to make, so it's taken a while. :-)
It sounds like you want programmatically retrieve the info from: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Jimbo_Wales.
If so, I'd recommend the MediaWiki Web API (https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php) for this. Perhaps the globaluserinfo API module? https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=globaluserinfo&... r=Jimbo+Wales&guiprop=groups|merged|unattached
If you must directly query the MediaWiki database using SQL, you'll likely need to read through the source code of the CentralAuth MediaWiki extension to figure out exactly what the PHP and SQL is doing with the underlying data. The source code of the CentralAuth MediaWiki extension can be found here: https://git.wikimedia.org/tree/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FCentralAuth.git. You'll likely want to read through central-auth.sql in particular.
Dan Andreescu wrote:
Any links to documentation on consuming data from the CentralAuth databases is welcome. We searched a bit and found mostly installation instructions.
Well, very generally you (or your program) probably shouldn't be querying the databases directly, but if you can provide more specific information about where you looked, we can probably add some redirects for future w[ao]nderers.
For general clarity, while I used www.mediawiki.org in the examples in this e-mail, because the Web API is retrieving global (wiki farm-wide) data, the equivalent URL paths should work on other Wikimedia wikis such as en.wikipedia.org or meta.wikimedia.org.
MZMcBride
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