Friday, June 01, 2012

#WMDEVDAYS - Single signon

One of the #Wikidata presentations posed a question: "We need a much improved single signon". For Wikidata it is important to be able to edit Wikidata itself while working at the same time on a Wikidata client. The presenter wanted to understand if this is an issue that needs to be addressed soon.

When you will be using Wikidata on one of the Wikimedia projects, you will typically use one user on all projects. This user is authenticated once when he signs on with his global user account and, this authentication serves him well when he works on other projects.

This will work well for Wikidata. The only issue left is that they also want to be usable and editable for users who use Wikidata from their own server. This however is an issue that they do not have to solve immediately.

There is existing functionality like OpenID that may provide a solution for this. It is great that the Wikidata people consider how the data can be used from outside the Wikimedia Foundation. It is wonderful that they provide a use case that makes a case for implementing OpenID.
Thanks,
     GerardM

4 comments:

Ryan Lane said...

Don't you mean OAuth?

GerardM said...

to quote Wikipedia .. "OAuth is a service that is complementary to, but distinct from, OpenID."
Thanks,
GerardM

Ryan Lane said...

I still think you are mistaken. I think you mean OAuth. What you are proposing doesn't work with OpenID.

GerardM said...

OAUTH is for connecting organisations ... When we do not support a Wikidata client with OAUTH, we can still support the person connecting to both websites through OpenID.
Thanks,
GerardM

PS we have always supported people first ...