Wikipedia:OpenID Proposal

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[edit] Introduction

OpenID is a decentralized identification service, that allows users to authenticate to a website (referred to an 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.

[edit] Proposal

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

[edit] Implementation

This proposal is already discussed on bugzilla bug 9604 and related bug 57 and awaits strong community support and consensus to be enabled.