Hello all
On 12 Apr 2005, at 3.15 AM, Thomas Gries wrote:
Is this, what is called on mediawiki "Single-user-login" see
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUL ?
Tom
They do look similar; the document does not specify a means to achieve
this, but rather a definition of the user-side requirements. So I
don't know if this is some centrally managed authentication mechanism,
which would be entirely appropriate for WikiMedia's projects and ...
less so for the other uses of MediaWiki, or whether it does imply a
similar system to Drupal's.
While I can see how there is a high convenience factor to just having
the MediaWiki community "piggyback" off of WikiMedia's infrastructure,
I would submit that making this framework on that can be used on other
publishing systems (other wikis, CMSes, blogging systems, etc) would
have several benefits:
• to users who interact with many different publishing systems, one
identity that is both secure and omnipresent is obviously beneficial
• specifically to users who might only encounter each publishing system
in one installation each, the resistance to registering to contribute
is high; they are far more likely to participate in any of those sites,
any of those systems, if the "speed bump" which is creating an account
presents a more compelling value proposition
• to site developers who need/want the features of two different
publishing systems for different parts of the site, a user experience
involving multiple accounts internal to their site would be quite
unacceptable; a unified framework would be one large step towards
allowing the site dev to provide a seamless user experience
• this may be a little naive, but it would seem that this is only the
first of many issues where some communication between the various
publishing system development staffs would lead to benefits all around
(for system devs reuse of code and "more eyeballs", for site devs more
features and greater interoperability, and finally for end-users,
again, a more seamless experience, and the ability to leverage their
knowledge of how to interact with one publishing system meaningfully to
get more out of the others they might work with.
Thanks
-RS