I'm wondering if anyone has dealt with the problem of wiki usernames no longer being unique. I'll explain....
In our company, we store usernames in Active Directory and use LDAP for MediaWiki authentication. This has worked reliably for years. Everyone has email addresses ending in "@company.com", and the person with email address "[email protected]" automatically gets the MediaWiki username "foobar". Now, our company has started acquiring other companies, and each one has its own internet domain (and they don't all use Active Directory, so we are experimenting with Auth0 for multidomain authentication). Suddenly, we can have users named [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. If we keep our current solution for creating usernames, all three of these addresses map to the username "foobar", and we have A Bad Situation. Has anyone else encountered this situation? If so, how did you solve it for MediaWiki? There are several obvious solutions, none of them perfect: 1. Use the entire email address (which is unique) as the MediaWiki username. This affects all existing accounts as well as new accounts. One side-effect is that some people have multiple email addresses ([email protected], [email protected]) and these would be considered different wiki users. That's not a deal-breaker... we can live with it. 2. Somehow map every email address globally to a unique ID, say, with a database table, and use that ID as the MediaWiki username. 3. Force every domain to use Active Directory, insert a unique ID into some Active Directory field, and use it as the MediaWiki username. This is not going to happen. We can't change every company's authentication mechanism. 4. Stop creating usernames automatically, and have users invent their own unique usernames. Not great in a corporate environment. When usernames don't match real names, it's inconvenient to locate the real people behind wiki edits. 5. ...? Any tips appreciated from anyone who has been there before. Thank you, DanB _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
