Wikimedia Blog/Single User Login

It's done: Introducing Single User Login

Finally, after a long journey of community discussion, programming and testing, SUL, short for Single User Login is working on the Wikimedia Foundation projects. Single User Login means that you no longer need to supply your username and password more than once during your edit/visit session to any of our vast collection of projects. Whether it is a new language of Wikipedia that you are visiting or you are uploading an image to the Commons, you are simply logged in. No need for making a new account for each site, your account is now global.

Single User Login removes the need to confirm your email account more than once and eliminates the need to do tedious work to change the password for your multiple accounts, now you change your password once and it automatically changes for every account you have. SUL will help remove the impersonation of editors across different projects as it is not possible any more to create an account if it is already taken on one project.

The communities have been eagerly waiting for SUL to arrive since January 2004. The huge task of creating a system to merge hundreds of communities and millions of user accounts took time, as there were many technical obstacles to overcome and decisions on which implementation to choose.

There is still more to come: there are discussions about making the preferences to apply globally. So, for instance, if your preferred language is ABC, then it will be set to ABC on every project you visit regardless of the project's language. That is just one example, there are many preferences would be available globally.

Visit Unified login @ Meta-Wiki for more information about SUL.