On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 04:43:19PM -0800, Jonathan Daugherty wrote:
# Any thoughts or concerns? I'm busy preparing some things and then # I'll attach a .diff to the bug ticket above.
I've uploaded the patch to the ticket at
Hi, Jonathan. I'm at RecentChangesCamp right now, and I've just heard a good presentation about OpenID and Mediawiki.
I think this sounds like a really cool patch, and I'm going to check it out, but I think from my point of view, the most important application for Mediawiki users is single-signon for multiple wikis.
Mediawiki as a consumer of identities, and not a producer, isn't very useful for this.
I also want to point out that there are now thousands of small, large, and medium-sized wikis using Mediawiki, and that they'd probably all benefit from a federated signon solution.
Also, OpenID seems to me prima facie as a pretty good solution to single-signeon for Wikimedia. It seems like identity on Wikimedia sites is really tied to a particular site. People say, "I'm X from French Wikibooks" or "I'm Y from English Wiktionary"; I think Wikimedians could absolutely live with namespacing around a "base" project.
So I wonder: considering that single-signon is such a hugely requested feature for Mediawiki, and considering that OpenID is a lightweight solution that would allow SSO not only for Wikimedia sites but for Mediawiki sites across the Web, would we Mediawiki developers think about using this solution along with or instead of custom-built solutions that require access to the same backend database?
I'm going to try to work with this patch to get an optional piece of code that's suitable for checking in to CVS.
~ESP