Proposal:Support OpenID

From Strategic Planning
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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation



This is a featured proposal.
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A feature request or bug related to this proposal has been submitted to Bugzilla under ID 9604.

See Category:Proposals with Bugzilla submissions for all submitted bugs.

A feature request or bug related to this proposal has been submitted to Bugzilla under ID 13631.

See Category:Proposals with Bugzilla submissions for all submitted bugs.

Summary

OpenID allows people to authenticate only once for many websites. As a consequence there is only one place where a password is known and this will make the Internet a (relatively) safer place.

Proposal

Install the OpenID extension on WMF servers and allow people to use their WMF user for authentication purposes to other websites.

Allow anonymous users to sign their contributions and authenticate their identity with their OpenID.

Include provision in the software setup for either inbound or outbound authentication to be enabled, disabled or limited by a whitelist or a blacklist of OpenID sites.

Recognise a new class of users, different from anonymous users and from logged in users

Motivation

Outbound authentication: The White House has announced that they will allow people to authenticate using OpenID. Some other sites are following suit. At this moment only commercial organisations provide this service. As these organisations typically have a potential conflict of interest, I would prefer the WMF to provide this service for me. It would also provide a way for wikipedians to contribute to other Wikis and have their contributions tied to their user page on wikipedia (provided the other wikis permitted inbound authentication).

Inbound authentication: Allowing users to sign their contributions with their OpenID would give them a way of tieing their wikipedia contributions to their their other activities - their contributions on other wikis, their blog etc. It would also give experts and the subjects of wikipedia biographies an easy way to confirm who they are when they want to comment or contribute information from personal knowledge.

Key Questions

Are there technical issues with the software and, what infrastructure do we need to provide this servive.

Potential Costs

The biggest cost is time spend by WMF developers ... they are busy as it is

References



Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Support OpenID.

Want to work on this proposal?

  1. .. Sign your name here!
  2. Wikinaut 22:33, 17 May 2011 (UTC) (maintainer of OpenID extension)