On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 10:21 PM Adam Sobieski adamsobieski@hotmail.com wrote:
In the scenario, after choosing to verify their name on their Wikipedia account, a user logs onto Wikipedia and uses OpenID Connect to link their Wikipedia account to multiple verified accounts, for example their Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. At the end of the process, we can envision the user obtaining a checkmark next to their full name on Wikipedia, their real name and a verification icon appearing next to their edits and on their user page. There might even be, per user settings, hyperlinks to their Facebook and LinkedIn pages on their Wikipedia user page. With such features, we can envision allowing groups of users or admins to determine that certain articles require a verified account to edit.
There has been a fair amount of discussion (mainly after the Essjay affair) on verified expert accounts on English Wikipedia, but ultimately the idea has been rejected. You can read about it at [1]. As others have noted, account linking is a fairly minor convenience for having verified real-life identities; if there was any intent to make that happen it would have happened regardless of software support.
Having non-public account linking (as an antispam measure that has better user experience than captchas) is a more feasible idea IMO; I wrote some thoughts on that at [2].
If you just want public links to verified accounts in MediaWiki (as opposed to Wikipedia / other Wikimedia projects), there is nothing stopping you; you should propose a patch to the OpenID Connect maintainer (all it takes is probably just adding a hook such as GetPreferences to display the information at the appropriate place) or write your own extension.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:There_is_no_credential_policy [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Tgr_(WMF)/external_login