Proposal:Support OpenID
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- Achieve continued growth in readership
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- Encourage Innovation
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
- Extension:OpenID
- http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/09/us-government-to-embrace-openid-courtesy-of-google-yahoo-paypal-et-al/
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?
- .. Sign your name here!
- Wikinaut 22:33, 17 May 2011 (UTC) (maintainer of OpenID extension)