[Foundation-l] Single login - decision 2004

[Rowan Collins]

On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 15:19:04 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> It is quite important to give the option for people to block a name in
> all other projects.  This is important for people to be able to have a
> global identity.  Forcing people to do this by hand is silly.
[...]
> It should be the default in all *new* cases where there is no
> conflict, and it should be sought (socially and peacefully) in all old
> cases.

I'd agree with this, and I think it's important in this discussion to
remember why it is that people want a unified login in the first
place. The number one reason is *not to need to register and login
seperately for each wiki*. Things like global watchlists, and talk
page notifications, come a close second, while global preferences
[with the ability for at least some to then be over-ridden project by
project] are essentially a pleasant side effect. (With a bigger
advantage once it's possible to pick your own language for the
interface).

Now, given that registration and login aren't exactly hard to begin
with, this means going to a new wiki has got to require an *absolute
minimum* of effort under the new system, else we've lost the main
advantage. Thus, a system where your name is just global, no matter
what, is ideal: you go to a new wiki, your name works; any system
which allows different names per project should probably allow opting
out of this (i.e. an off-by-default option "confirm my desired
username when I visit a new wiki"). If the user *does* want different
names, they can be given a form, pre-filled with their default name,
as a kind of "quick registration".

Ideally, the check for globally-logged-in status [i.e. on a site they
haven't used this session, and may *never* have used] should happen as
soon as a user loads a page from a new wiki, or at the very least when
they first edit. There is, however, a technical problem, which I don't
think I've seen mentioned elsewhere: identification cookies belong for
security to one domain, and different Wikimedia projects have
different domains - so, e.g., en.wikipedia.org and en.wiktionary.org
can't access the same cookies. [See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_login/IMSoP2#Cookies for more]

This may mean, unless I'm missing something, that we'll need a "quick
login" button - one click, and the site knows who you are because you
already filled in your password on a different wiki. An additional
touch might be to have a "...and log me in" box on the edit screen -
so if you've done your edits, it will look up your global login and
save the change in one go. Indeed, something like this (w/ boxes for
name and passwd) might be nice *anyway* (Livejournal has it, for
instance)...

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]