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News/2024 Migrating Wikitech Account to SUL

From Wikitech

A process has begun to migrate wikitech.wikimedia.org wiki accounts from Developer accounts to Wikimedia Unified Login (SUL/single user login) accounts. This work will unblock wikitech.wikimedia.org from migrating to hosting in the "WikiKube" Kubernetes cluster that hosts Wikimedia movement project wikis.

What you need to do

To ensure a smooth transition, we request that you manually link your Wikitech account to a Wikimedia SUL account of your choice before October 1st, 2024. Please follow these steps:

  • Log in to https://idm.wikimedia.org with the same Developer account username and password you would use on Wikitech.
  • Follow the instructions provided to link your Developer account to your Wikimedia Global Account (SUL).

Note if you are using Toolforge you may have linked your LDAP and SUL accounts via Striker (toolsadmin.wikimedia.org). The linking is currently not shared with Bitu and you need to link your LDAP and SUL account in Bitu manually.

What is changing

One of the historic roles of wikitech.wikimedia.org has been the creation and management of Developer accounts. In order to manage these accounts, Wikitech itself uses Extension:LDAP Authentication to connect local MediaWiki accounts with the Developer account data that we store in an LDAP directory. The LDAP Authentication extension itself has been largely unmaintained for many years. Other communities who used it have moved on to replacement systems, but Wikitech has not. This was largely due to the use of Extension:OpenStackManager by Wikitech. Extension:OpenStackManager required Extension:LDAP Authentication to function.

After several years of work, Extension:OpenStackManager has been fully replaced by a combination of horizon.wikimedia.org and idm.wikimedia.org. This has unblocked a long desired migration of wikitech.wikimedia.org from using Developer accounts to identify editors to using SUL accounts. Functionally everyone contributing to the Wikimedia movement has a SUL account, but only a small percentage of us have Developer accounts. We hope that the SUL migration will allow more Wikimedians to contribute to the technical documentation here on Wikitech. It will also remove a special dependency from the wiki which will make it easier for us to move to a different hosting configuration.

Account migration details

Developer accounts that are linked to SUL accounts
If you link your Developer and SUL accounts by the deadline, edits made by your legacy Wikitech account will be migrated to your Wikimedia Global Account (SUL). This will retain your full edit history and attribution for past contributions in one place.
Unlinked Developer accounts
If you do not link your accounts by the deadline, your legacy Wikitech account will be migrated to a local placeholder account (for example OLDWIKITECHUSERNAME~wikitech). This is similar to what was done for unclaimed local accounts during the SUL migration for content wikis in 2015. Your edits will still be visible in page history, but you will no longer be able to login to that account and new edits will be made under a new SUL account with no immediate link to your past edits.

If you have already linked your accounts, no further action is required at this time.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us at Portal:Toolforge/About Toolforge#Communication and support

We are also maintaining an FAQ page below that hopefully answers some questions you may have.

FAQ

Will my Wikitech user name change?

Possibly, yes:

  • If your Wikitech account and your SUL account have matching names, for example User:Legoktm and meta:User:Legoktm, then neither user name will change.
  • If your Wikitech account and your SUL account have different names, for example User:BryanDavis and meta:User:BDavis (WMF), then your Wikitech account will be renamed to match your SUL account.
  • Wikitech accounts that do not have a SUL account associated when the migration occurs will be renamed to ensure that they do not collide with present or future SUL accounts by appending something like ~wikitech to the former account name. (~ is a character not normally allowed in Wikimedia SUL account names.) These accounts will also become inaccessible by virtue of not having an associated password. It is currently unknown if these accounts will be recoverable in the future.

Will my Developer account user name or shell account name change?

No. Wikitech is being separated from Developer accounts, but no other systemic changes to Developer accounts are planned at this time.

Will my logins to Cloud VPS, Toolforge, Horizon, Gerrit, GitLab, Phabricator change?

No. These systems all use Developer accounts today and will continue to use Developer accounts in the foreseeable future.

Your Phabricator account may already be connected to your SUL account as Phabricator logins can use either, or even both!, systems. This will not be changing as part of the Wikitech SUL migration.

How will I manage the password, email address, ssh keys, etc of my Developer account after the SUL migration?

https://idm.wikimedia.org has already become the central location for mw:Developer account management. You can read more about this identity management service at IDM.

When will the SUL migration happen?

No public timeline has been announced yet, but you can safely assume it will be on or after September 16th, 2024.

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