I whipped up a little extension for MediaWiki that implements the
MicroID standard (
http://www.microid.org/ ).
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MicroID_extension
MicroID is a teeny-tiny standard that lets users with accounts on
multiple Web services assert that those accounts belong to the same
person. The standard consists of a single <meta> element with a hash of
the user's email address and the address of the current page. MicroIDs
are lightweight, relatively hard to spoof without control of the server,
and help assert identity without sharing private information.
The extension I wrote adds a MicroID <meta> tag for User: pages for
registered users with confirmed email addresses. The user can set
whether they want to show their MicroID or not in the "Misc" tab of the
Special:Preferences page. (Someone using MicroID to verify a user's
identity has to know their email address already first; however, some
users may not want to share their identity in any way.)
The extension has, as far as I can tell, little performance impact. It
loads the user record for the user page, but since that's loaded anyways
for user pages there's not much cost.
The feature is rolled out on Wikitravel and we've had some positive
feedback on it. It would probably be a useful extension to add for
Wikimedia projects.
~Evan
--
Evan Prodromou <evan(a)prodromou.name>