Bryan Tong Minh wrote:
Sometimes the problem comes up that an external tool needs to verify whether a user is the same user as on a wiki. For example one may want an opt-in system for an editcounter [1]. Or you are organizing a competition in which every Wikimedian can vote [2]. Currently such authentication is done with various hacks, such as posting some code in an edit summary, abusing the mail features of mediawiki or having the user post a certain token to a wiki page. This is not ideal and moreover quite complicated for the non tech savvy people.
Sounds like a job for OpenID...
It's on the agenda (Evan's been maintaining an extension, though we haven't taken it on yet).
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)