Wikipedia:OpenID Proposal

Introduction
OpenID is a decentralized identification service, that allows users to authenticate to a website (referred to as a "consumer") by providing, and proving ownership of a URL where an OpenID provider is running.

There are several significant advantages to this approach - the most important is that users do not have to maintain login information for multiple websites - all authentication is delegated back to a site of the user's choice.

A MediaWiki extension already exists to support OpenID.

Proposal
It is proposed that OpenID logins should be enabled on the English Wikipedia as soon as technically possible. This would not affect current login methods, only provide an alternative mechanism by which users could log in, without need to register an account first.

Implementation
This proposal is already discussed on bugzilla bug 9604: Support OpenID extension on all wikimedia projects. Bug 3060: Support OpenID Authentication within Mediawiki has already been resolved fixed. Bug 57: Single login (Unified login) on all wikimedia projects is already resolved fixed.

Previous discussions

 * Page on meta where it is proposed (and later announced the completion) that Mediawiki should support OpenID.
 * Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_1: discussions between 22 and 23 Oct. 2007
 * Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_18 a proposal and discussion between 25 and 27 Jan. 2008; seemingly leading to the creation of this proposal page.
 * Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_49 another discussion between 1 and 6 Oct. 2008
 * Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_54: discussion from 22 - 23 Jan 2009, including discussion of Facebook Connect
 * Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_67: 11-13 Dec 2010, short discussion of advantages

These discussions typically exhibit support for the idea.

Userboxes

 * User:Awg1010/OpenID