[Mediawiki-l] Best strategy to populate User data from Single Sign On?

Fri Apr 28 14:56:31 UTC 2006

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mediawiki-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-
> bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Brian Carpenter
> Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 2:39 PM
> To: mediawiki-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Best strategy to populate User data from Single
> Sign On?
> 
> I would like the common name (Bobby Jones) to appear on MediaWiki pages as
> Username. But to account for duplicate names (200,000+ employees here) it
> would be acceptable to have the Username be
> Commonfullname_Uniqueemployeenum
> (Bobby Jones 395234).
> 
> What happens when Roberta Jones gets married and becomes 'Roberta Chang'
> a.k.a. 'Bobby Chang'?
> The next time she visits the wiki, 'Bobby Chang 395234' will not be found
> in
> the user table and the AutoLogin script will create a new user.  Poor
> Bobby
> will now have to manage a double identity. Or worse, she will email me and
> ask if I can move all her old history/data/pages to her new name.
> 
> A) I don't know how to do that
> B) there are 200,000+ potential wiki users here. About half of them could
> all get married, divorced, widowed and remarried,
> 
> Best to figure this out before we release this to production,
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There was an extension for mediawiki 1.5:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Renameuser

Not sure if it still works.

Otherwise, you may have to use some kind of login that will never change
(not terribly easy with people getting married).

If you use LDAP, you can extend my LDAP Authentication plugin to incorporate
the code from the rename user extension, and some tracking mechanism in LDAP
to tell when a user has changed names, and automatically rename their old
account.

If you verify the rename user code works, I may be able to help you with
adding it to my plugin.

Also, my plugin supports pulling preferences from the LDAP server. So you
can have their "Real Name" and "Nickname" preferences updated automatically
if it is changed in LDAP.

If you aren't using LDAP, then sorry for the bother :).

V/r,

Ryan Lane