openid on the wiki?

[Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 10:40:25AM -0800, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> On 01/24/2012 09:13 AM, Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden wrote:
> > Given gerrit already works with openid I was wondering if the wiki
> > could support the same. It seems there is an extension[1], and it
> > also seems it's packaged for fedora[2]. Has anyone looked into this
> > and would it be a desirable addition?
> >
> > [1]: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID [2]:
> > http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=5922
>
> My major concern with the wiki is keeping us from having spammers ever
> get accounts on there. We have enough trouble gardening our own work,
> we'd get buried if we had to manage spam pages.
>
> I would reckon that OpenID would give a way for spammers to come in,
> unless we limited the OpenID servers we worked with, which would
> sort-of be against the reason for having OpenID in the first place.
>
> But I'm very open to other thinking, just unsure how it would be
> implemented.
I have no experience with mediawiki + openid myself, but maybe giving it
a go and monitor it would be good enough for now.

Possible downsides:
- Spammers use openid to spam

Possible upsides:
- More open to new people
- People can use a single account for both gerrit and the wiki

Since the wiki edits are also shown on IRC I think spam would be caught
fast enough and in the worst case the change could be reverted.