Skip to content
Diff

Diff

  • Categories
    • Equity & Inclusion
    • Education & Open Access
    • Technology
    • Partnerships & Events
    • Policy & Advocacy
    • Movement Strategy
  • About
  • Submit
  • Calendar

Single-User Login provides access to all wikis

14 April 2015 by Keegan Peterzell
Translate this post

Collaboration logo V2.svg
Later this month, everyone will be able to use the same user name on every wiki, thanks to Single-User Login. As a result, cross-wiki collaboration and communication is expected to improve. Collaboration logo by Berdea, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

On March 16, 2001, two months after Wikipedia’s creation, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced and launched the first Wikipedia projects to be written in languages other than English, starting with the German and Catalan Wikipedias. The Wikimedia Foundation now hosts over 900 wikis in hundreds of languages, covering ten subject areas; this includes Meta-Wiki, the global community site, and MediaWiki.org, the website for development and documentation of the software that runs the Wikimedia wikis.

Problem

The rapid growth of the projects presented a problem early on — one that is finally being solved this month with Single-User Login: accounts created on one wiki used to only work on that wiki. If you wanted to edit a different wiki, you had to register a new account. Sometimes, and with growing frequency over the years, your account name was already registered by someone else on that different wiki. Lack of single-user login required you to register a different account name, splitting your identity across the wikis. This caused problems in software development, making it hard to develop global notifications or global watchlists, for example. The lack of persistent identity across the wikis also caused problems with users being mistaken for other users: users blocked on one wiki were sometimes assumed to be the same person on another, for instance. As of last month, there were 2.8 million accounts with conflicting, identical usernames, out of over 90 million local accounts.

History

As early as May 2004, while proposing Wikimedia Commons as a free media repository, Erik Moeller (User:Eloquence) put forward the idea of using Commons as a place to unify all usernames. In June of 2005 the first specifics were proposed to establish and use “global accounts.” The Wikimedia Foundation committed software architect and engineer Brion Vibber to work on that project. Due to various complications, the resulting global log-in system, CentralAuth, was not ready for general use until 2008 — and only in 2009 were new account name requests checked against those that registered their global name. Following a community request in 2012 to complete single-user login and make all accounts global, the Wikimedia Foundation provided more resources for that task. In the spring of 2013, James Forrester was tasked with unifying and globalizing all accounts, and early planning began. Dan Garry took over the project at the end of 2013, and throughout the summer of 2014 he led the engineering work to complete the task. I, Keegan Peterzell, took over the project once most engineering challenges had been met, at the end of October 2014.

Implementation

The move to all-global accounts has been taking place in stages over the past eight months. In August 2014, we started migrating all local accounts that did not conflict with another local account or a global account, making them global across all wikis. In September 2014, the ability to rename accounts moved from local requests to a global group, to prevent local renames that would separate an account from its global owner. In November and December 2014, we tested new global rename processing tools. In January 2015, GlobalRenameRequest was deployed on all wikis, with the special queue where requests are sent for processing. This special page allows users to request a new name from the wiki on which they are logged in, using localized, translated text. The form is short and allows global renamers to smoothly process requests from all wikis. In February 2015, we focused on preventing the ability to create an account that conflicted with a global account by anyone, as well as contacting over 80,000 accounts with unconfirmed email addresses to request confirmation. In March 2015, a script was run over all the remaining clashing accounts, based on a rename selection scheme to determine the final global accounts and which other accounts needed to be renamed.

Final stages

On March 17, 2015, we started contacting the 2.8 million accounts being renamed. Since being contacted, over 1.34 million accounts have been connected to their global accounts and will no longer need to be renamed; and over 10,000 accounts have been renamed to a new global account name of their choosing. This week, we will begin the process of renaming the remaining 1.46 million accounts – those which have not responded to all attempts at outreach. That process is expected to take approximately one to two weeks. Once renamed, account owners will still be able to log in using their old credentials and will be shown information about the renaming. At any point after being renamed, all affected accounts are free to request a new name of their choice, using GlobalRenameRequest. To learn more, visit this help page.

Once finalization is complete, every account on Wikimedia projects will be unique in all projects. Any confusion about user identities will be addressed by setting up a global user page for your account in the unified world; and software developers will be able to start projects that had been put on hold for over a decade due to this ongoing issue.

As a result of Single-User Login, cross-wiki collaboration and communication should improve, which should help the health of the overall Wikimedia movement. I look forward to sharing this new, unified wiki experience with the rest of you. The wait and the work should all be well worth it.

Keegan Peterzell
Community Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation

Share this:

  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

Can you help us translate this article?

In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?

Start translation

Related

4 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Matthew Flaschen
10 years ago
#23755

Congratulations! This is a big deal, and will pave the way for a lot of features.

0
hi
10 years ago
#23756

hello, since the day you mentioned, i still see no one got renamed

0
webdesigner
9 years ago
#23757

I would like to thank you for the efforts you’ve put in penning this site.
I am hoping to view the same high-grade content from you later on as well.
In truth, your creative writing abilities has inspired me to
get my own website now 😉

0
Cross-wiki notifications unite a world of messages in one window – Wikimedia blog
9 years ago
#23758

[…] when the SUL finalization project was finished in 2015 did cross-wiki notifications become technically feasible. The […]

0

Meta

Posted in Community, Deployments, Global, Technology, Wikimedia, WikipediaTagged engineering, identity, Single User Login, SUL, unified login, user profile, Wikimedia Blog (EN Archive), Wikipedia

Related

Welcome to Diff

Welcome to Diff, a community blog by – and for – the Wikimedia movement. Join Diff today to share stories from your community and comment on articles. We want to hear your voice!

Learn more

Subscribe to Diff via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to Diff and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Upcoming Events

May 7
7 May-7 June

Bangla Wikibooks Writing contest 2025

Organizer: Bangla WikiConnect
May 18
18 May-24 May

International Museum Day Editathon 2025

Organizer: Wikimedia Bangladesh
May 23
23 May-25 May

ESEAP Strategy Summit 2025

View Calendar

Wikimedia News

Wikimedia Foundation News

  • Our new AI strategy puts Wikipedia’s humans first
    30 April 2025 by Chris Albon and Leila Zia

Wikimedia Technology Blog

  • Promoting events and WikiProjects
    12 May 2025 by Ilana Fried and Claudio Melo

Down the Rabbit Hole

  • “Redemption”: The winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2024
    8 April 2025 by Wikimedia

Diff

This is Diff, a Wikimedia community blog.

All participants are responsible for building a place that is welcoming and friendly to everyone. Learn more about Diff.

A Wikimedia Foundation Project

Links

  • Join
  • Subscribe
  • Guidelines
  • Editorial guidelines
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
Log in

Content licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA) unless otherwise noted.
Powered by WordPress.com VIP, Automattic Privacy Notice.

wpDiscuz
 Report this comment
You are going to send email to

Move Comment