Quite a bit of discussion lately on planet wikimedia (a lovely aggregator of dozens of wiki-focussed blogs) about something called SUL – that’s Single User Login if you’re not the sort of person who doesn’t find yourself logging into a Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, or similar Wikimedia project account.
Although any human on the planet can edit a Wikimedia project without an account, the majority of editors take advantage of user accounts on all of the projects to keep track of their edits, share background about their interests, and to communicate with other Wikimedia volunteers. On English Wikipedia alone there are over 7,000,000 separate registered user accounts.
And although lots of editors spend the majority of their time in one project, say Wikipedia, there are thousands of other editors who dabble in other Wikimedia projects several public and internal planning wikis.
Obviously this presents one unfortunate problem – a dozen separate user accounts on each project. Hence, SUL! Project volunteers can now follow a process that migrates all of their individual accounts into one master account for all the projects. new volunteers will be able to take advantage of this as well, using one unique username and password for all of their cross-project work.
Volunteer developers and staff developers began rolling the system out over the last few months for select users, and as of today it’s open to anyone and everyone with multiple accounts across the projects.
Although this might not have a dramatic impact on your own wiki experience, rest-assured that it will ultimately make the lives of all our multi-project editors much, much easier. Bravo to the team for a job well done.
Get hooked up with SUL here – follow the discussion and check out what others are saying as well.
J. Walsh, Head of Communications