[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[MZMcBride]

Risker wrote:
> As far as I know, since always, Casey.  One must log in separately there;
> going from another WMF project, one's login doesn't follow.  One of the main
> reasons for the creation of SUL was so users could go from WMF project to
> project without having to log in again; partly for ease of use, but also
> because there are an awful lot of editors who don't want to link their
> usernames to their IP addresses, even accidentally. Especially now that most
> experienced users take SUL for granted, it's a barrier to participation when
> a link to a WMF project seeking broad participation requires editors to log
> in again, and hope that someone else hasn't created an account with their
> username first.

You're both right. In a literal sense, strategy.wikimedia.org doesn't work
with unified login. That is, when you log in through en.wikipedia.org or
elsewhere, you won't be logged in to every place where you have a Wikimedia
account of the same name. (Though I think if you log in through
strategy.wikimedia.org, you get the cookies for that site and the other
sites, but you still wouldn't get the cookies for other *.wikimedia.org
wikis.) A lot of people say "unified login" to mean you don't need to
re-register your account and that your account will be linked to a global
account of the same name, not that it will be automatically logged in,
however. That was Casey's confusion.

This particular issue is the subject of bug 14407.[1] Whether it's a real
barrier to entry, I don't know. The people involved in content work really
don't need to be sucked into the kind of place that strategy.wikimedia.org
is, in my opinion. :-)

MZMcBride

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14407