Talk:Digital credential

Rewriting od the article
The article has been rewritten to follow the Wikipedia standards for neutral and encyclopedic writing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TomRichomme (talk • contribs) 17:44, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

How to improve this article IMHO
This article leaves me unsatisfied. It *does* reflect my frustration with the conflicting use of the term. I was hoping it would provide some clarity. Where are these conflicts made? It's okay to have conflicts within an article as long as they are in separate contexts. For an example that I made up: "the cryptographic community uses the term this way, and the banking community uses it this other way."

I've decided that for myself, I won't use the term "credential" unless I want to speak in general. I can't control what others say -- they often mean something very specific, like a public key certificate, or a user name and password.

Forgive me for not making changes to the article myself. Maybe I will later. Instead I'm making these recommendations. Remember, everything in Wikipedia must be a rehashing of what is written elsewhere, so do some reading and cite it.

1. Add relevant detailed examples! the first section lists a few good examples, however, the only example that is explained in great detail, digital cash, is not a typical example of a credential.

2. "Anonymous digital credential" is more than half the article. The article either needs to balance this with other concepts, or split out the details of anonymous digital credential to its own article.

3. I think the term is so overloaded (over-ridden?) that perhaps it could be viewed similar to a disambiguity page. It does get nailed down within particular scopes, so maybe listing those scopes is useful:

- Credentials as used for authentication ( for example mention Security token )

- Credentials as authorization, permission, entitlements

- Credentials carried by people

- Credentials repositories

- Credentials in operating systems

- Credential as used in SAML and X800 (see below)

4. I've found a definition in two important standards documents. Maybe someone can make sense of this usage within this wiki article: credentials - Data that is transferred to establish the claimed identity of an entity.

This definition is use in both of these important documents:

ISO 7498-2:1989, ITU-T Recommendation X.800 (1991)

SAML 2.0 glossary

--Dlotts (talk) 19:56, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Value based statements
to my taste there are too many statements of the form this and that is better than this and that in the text. The article should focus on the facts. As the applications of credentials can be very diverse it is not so easy to judge which credential is the 'better' one.

--Markulf 15:14, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

What about credentials that are not directly related to persons?
Credentials could certify something about a machine or a process. In fact this is what happens for Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) in Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs).

--Markulf 18:09, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Anonymous Digital Credentials vs. Digital Credentials
Should we have independent pages for Anonymous Digital Credentials and Digital Credentials?

--Markulf 18:09, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

POV-check
This article reads like a sales piece in parts, at least as far as Brands credentials. -- Taral 04:22, 19 September 2007 (UTC)


 * ✅ I've removed the NPOV template, please use or better yet  for sentences, then detail issues here. This will help address them in a timely manner. - RoyBoy 22:56, 11 December 2011 (UTC)