OpenID

Angela Beesley's wiki

OpenID is, according to Wikipedia, "a decentralized system to verify one's online identity".

This is going to be extremely valuable for wiki farms.

One problem with a new wiki is knowing whether someone is a trusted user. Whilst OpenID isn't itself a trust metric, it can at least help people to link up their identities between wikis, allowing Wikia's communities and staff to more easily judge whether to make someone an admin on a wiki, based on their access to other wikis, such as Wikipedia or Wikitravel. Simply using the same name isn't enough when it's so easy to make an account and impersonate someone (one of the reasons I've disabled account creation on WikiAngela).

One popular provider of OpenIDs is Janrain, who sold their wiki farm Schtuff.com to PBWiki. I predicted in February that other wiki hosts were going to take a similar approach and adopt OpenID, and so far Wikispaces and Wetpaint have done so. I don't believe that allowing people to more easily log in to other sites, even other wikis, is going to reduce traffic to the wiki farms that provide this option.

So, when is Wikia going to adopt OpenID? Probably once we know what Wikimedia are going to do. At the moment, Wikia's community is very close to the Wikimedia ones so we need to consider being as compatible with them as we can be. The reason this is on my wiki, not my blog, is that I expect frequent updates to this topic as Wikia and Wikimedia start using OpenID, and wikis are updatable in a way that blogs are not.

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Hi, Angela! I got your email, and I'm glad to see this note. I absolutely agree that maintaining an identity silo, in 2007, is not going to be good for any site. I think there's a temptation to try and keep users locked into only one site by any means possible, including not supporting OpenID. But I think most forward-thinking companies, like Wikia, are smart enough to avoid that temptation.

I don't have the same concerns about compatibility, though. In my discussions with Brion, he's always maintained that Wikimedia will roll out the OpenID extension that's available today. Even if, for some reason, they wanted to start over from scratch, it's unlikely that Wikimedia is going to roll out an OpenID implementation that doesn't conform to the OpenID standard. Brion and Tim are smarter than that -- there's no point in implementing an open standard if you make it incompatible with other implementations.

Anyways, it's good to hear that Wikia's thinking about the issue. There's probably some publicity advantage for your company in announcing support of the technology sooner rather than later, since announcing support of OpenID today is newsworthy, and supporting it a year from now is not. But I can see why taking a conservative stance is a good idea, too. As other wiki farms and independent wikis come online with OpenID over the next six months, there's going to be a better value proposition for your customers in supporting the standard. --Evan

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