Hi Rob,
The SSO activity has been somewhat dormant for a
couple months now,
but
is probably can be resurrected if someone (you?) volunteers to
shepherd
the effort.
As it turns out, Dan Libby of
videntity.org just 20 minutes ago
published a MediaWiki patch
to allow for OpenID-based SSO.
http://wiki.www.videntity.org/wiki/MediaWiki_OpenID_Patch
If someone (you?) were to say, implement a LID server
and client for
MediaWiki, that would give it a big head start over other potential
solutions.
You are probably right, but from my perspective, this isn't a matter
of a "land grab" before "the other guy" gets too much market share
with their protocol, whatever it may be ;-) [I might be exaggerating
your point here ...]
In my mind, the question is "what can we do to reduce the number of
usernames and passwords that users have to use, how can be increase
user convenience, how can we reduce spam and other bad stuff, how can
we build cool new social stuff" on top of what hopefully will be a
globally interoperable, privacy-protected, user-controlled identity
infrastructure that pretty much everybody can buy into. We're trying
to proactively do our part here ...
It wouldn't be the simplest solution to
intra-Wikimedia SSO,
but it would work, assuming that the LID libraries are mature
enough to
deal with Wikimedia's demands. If such a solution were to get
substantial testing outside of the Wikimedia realm of servers, that
would be a big argument for the maturity of the solution.
You are making a good point, and this is one of the reasons I posted
to the list here -- how would one get any of this deployed with
acceptably low risk to the operation of wikipedia? And for my own
better understanding: how has that been done in the past by this
project?
Cheers,
Johannes Ernst
http://netmesh.info/jernst