Help:Unified login

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←Help pages Unified login
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H:UL
Your global account (also called unified login or SUL/single user login) is your single username reserved across all Wikimedia projects (except some special wikis). This gives you a consistent identity throughout Wikimedia, enables features like global user pages, reduces vectors for impersonation, and lets you visit many projects without manually logging in on each wiki. You can create a global account by visiting Special:MergeAccount on a project where you already have an account and following the instructions there.

About global accounts[edit]

What it is[edit]

The Wikimedia Foundation operates many editable wikis in many languages. Traditionally, users had to create separate user accounts on each wiki. This made it more difficult to participate across many wikis, especially as Wikimedia Commons made multimedia integration more essential and Wikidata became the central wiki for interwiki links.

Your global account solves these problems by reserving your name on all wikis (so nobody else can impersonate you), and automatically creating your local account when you visit a wiki you've never visited before.

How to unify your accounts[edit]

User accounts are now global by default, but older accounts had to be manually unified by visiting Special:MergeAccount. You can use Special:CentralAuth to view details about your global account. The email address and password you configure on Special:Preferences will be used on all wikis. This means that you will be able to log in at any public Wikimedia project with just one single username and password.

What it changes[edit]

Registering a username on any public Wikimedia wiki automatically reserves that name on all the others; this means different users can no longer register the same account on different wikis. Users only need to set and confirm their email address in one account. Changing the password in any wiki changes it in all wikis accordingly. Special:UserLogin now logs the user in to every unified wiki simultaneously, and navigating away from the login page before it is fully loaded may result in incomplete login (i.e. users may not log in to all wikis successfully).

Additional wikis will be added to the user's login the first time they are visited. For example, a regular user at Commons and German Wikipedia will not automatically login to English Wikibooks, but if that user visits English Wikibooks once while logged in, they will then login to English Wikibooks every time (to see which wikis you log in to, see Special:CentralAuth).

What it doesn't change[edit]

  • Some things are still local:
    • User rights are mostly local, which means that administrators will not have administrator access everywhere. Global groups such as global rollback, global sysop, global interface editors and global IP block exemption can be requested at Steward requests/Global permissions.
    • User preferences are local, although the email address only needs to be set and confirmed in one place. You can continue to have different preferences on different sites. It may be possible in the future to set global preferences.[1]
    • Notification when you receive a new message is still local; you will only see the "new messages" notification for the site you're looking at. This may change in the future.[2][3]
  • Users can still have differently named accounts on two sites; however, these accounts will not be linked together into one global account.
  • The global account system is only available for open Wikimedia projects; sites which run on the MediaWiki software but are not operated by the Foundation will continue to have separate account systems, even if they installed CentralAuth extension, which is responsible for the unified login system.

Conflict resolution[edit]

See also: Single User Login finalisation announcement

The system will automatically merge identically named accounts if they have the same authenticated email address, or the user can correctly provide their password.

Because registration has for a long time been separate for each wiki, there are many user names that belong to different people on different projects. The new system only allows one user per name, so there are some cases where accounts will need to be renamed. This must be done manually by a steward (see Steward requests/Username changes).

Users may search for collisions before merging by using Special:CentralAuth.

History[edit]

Early discussions can be seen on the Single login page.

Brion Vibber discussed how this might work in the December 2005 Berlin roundup, uploaded implementation notes to the code base in April 2006, and it was the subject of a presentation at Wikimania 2006.

Brion announced a successful migration test in November 2006. Data collection took two hours and automatic merging took five hours. 4,457,075 primary accounts were confirmed, with 578,128 secondary accounts merged automatically based on matching email addresses or by cannibalizing unused accounts. 134,242 secondary accounts will need to be merged with user interaction (71,741 unique user names have accounts left unmerged).

Unified login was implemented for administrators only in March 2008, and Steward requests/SUL requests (now a redirect to SRUC) was created to resolve conflicts in unified logins. Unified login was enabled for all users on May 27, 2008 on an opt-in basis. On August 22, 2008, CentralAuth was set to make a global account for all users registered after this date. The change removed the need for manual merging of accounts.

On 30 April 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that the unified login system would be changing so that there would be only unique global accounts with the same username across all Wikimedia projects; there would be no two users sharing the same username on different wikis. With SUL finalization, all non-global accounts will be converted to global accounts where possible and if there is clash in the username, they will be renamed to have a "~" and the wiki name will be appended to the username. For example, an account with the username "Example" on the Dutch Wiktionary, which will be renamed, would become "Example~nlwiktionary". Initially, it was announced to take place in May 2013. However, this was delayed to August 2013, and in August 2013, this expectation was removed.

As part of this process, GlobalRenameUser function was introduced in July 2014 and the local rename user tool was removed from bureaucrats' toolset in September 2014.

The mass renaming process of users with conflicts in username started on 15 April 2015 and was finished by 22 April 2015. Since 15 July 2015, only users with unified global accounts are allowed to login on Wikimedia projects.

Frequently asked questions[edit]

Can my global username be renamed?[edit]

Yes. You can request renames by using this form or by placing a request at Steward requests/Username changes, where a steward or a global renamer will look into your request. See the global rename policy for details.

I don't like my new username after SUL finalization. Can I have my previous username back again?[edit]

This may or may not be possible depending on the circumstances. Ask whether you can have your previous username on Steward requests/Username changes.

I have two or more accounts with different names. Can they be merged into one account?[edit]

No, but this feature will be available soon. Note that usernames on most individual projects can preemptively be renamed.

Someone is using my name on another wiki. How can I get that account?[edit]

The existence of the other account does not necessarily stop you from getting the global account. However, you might not be the one with the superior claim to the username if, for example, the other user has more edits or is a member of certain groups such as sysops or bureaucrats. You may have to ask them to rename, or you may have to rename your account.

You can place a request at Steward requests/Username changes to "usurp" another username which is already in use.

Will I have autoconfirmed status on other wikis?[edit]

No. You will have to wait the appropriate amount of time after first logging into each particular wiki, before getting autoconfirmed status.

Can I merge accounts from restricted-account-creation wikis?[edit]

No, it is not currently possible. This is to prevent a user from creating an account on an open wiki and then merging it into a restricted wiki, which would allow the user access to the restricted one.

See also[edit]

Announcements and news[edit]

Tasks[edit]

Discussions[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ↑ Bug 14950
  2. ↑ Bug 1066
  3. ↑ Bug 65661
User group in Meta
without global effects
User group in Meta with global effects
User groups only exist in some wikis
Cross-wiki local groups
Global groups
Links in italic indicate that the user group is not a real user group.
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