User:Taavi/Accounts, explained

There are about two primary user account systems in the Wikimedia circles:

Global accounts

aka: Wikimedia account, SUL account, Single User Login account, Central account, Wikipedia account, Unified login/account

This is the account system used to log in to ~all public Wikimedia wikis.

MediaWiki, our wiki software, did not originally have a way to share accounts between individual wikis. This was sub-optimal,^{[citation needed]} so we wrote a MediaWiki extension called CentralAuth to act as a glue layer between the "local" MediaWiki accounts. Our deployment of this extension is called the "Unified login" or "single user login" ("SUL") system.

The distinction between "local" and "global" accounts is also still very much present and visible in the various administrative and anti-abuse workflows.

Developer accounts

aka: LDAP account, Labs account, Gerrit account, WMCS account, Cloud account, Labs LDAP

"Wikimedia developer account" how we call accounts in the LDAP deployment used for logging into various pieces of infrastructure that's primarily of interest to technical contributors.

These are created via IDM or Striker, and logged in either via a direct username+password prompt on the service or via IDP.

Production shell accounts

Production access ("Unix account"/"[production] shell access") is managed separately, but the account details (uid number and name) will mirror those in the developer account LDAP tree.

Special cases

Phabricator

Phabricator allows users to log in with either their Global/SUL accounts or their Developer accounts.

Private wikis

Private wikis (e.g. officewiki, various committee private wikis, etc.) have their own MediaWiki account databases that are not linked up to the SUL system.

WMF staff corporate accounts

The corporate account system managed by the WMF's IT Services team, used for corporate mail, Slack, etc is independent of the rest of the account systems mentioned here.

Other terms

CentralIdLookup: MediaWiki mechanism to translate between IDs of local and global account.
Temporary account: Special type of MediaWiki accounts given to users who have not explicitely registered and logged in to an account. These exist both on the local and global account levels. See mw:Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts for more details.
User: In MediaWiki contexts, the User class represents a local account.
Wikitech user: In the past, this was one way of how we referred to Developer accounts (and Wikitech used to be the primary way to sign up for and manage those). That is still the most likely thing someone is referring to with that term even if in 2025, Wikitech was made to be a SUL wiki.