Do we actually want to do this? I'm not sure that we do.

If there are problems after rolling out, we should be rolling back, fixing and trying again. Not letting people opt out.

In T377140#10496666, @JTweed-WMF wrote:

Do we actually want to do this? I'm not sure that we do.

If there are problems after rolling out, we should be rolling back, fixing and trying again. Not letting people opt out.

If someone is confused about things rather than the procedure being broken, this lets them go back to a method they know and can rely on. This can be useful. I agree that if things are out-and-out bugged, we want to know about it.

On the other hand, this isn't an optional change.

If someone is confused about it or doesn't want to use the new method,
we're not giving them that choice.

I really think this is an "it works or it doesn't" situation.

Change #1118840 had a related patch set uploaded (by Gergő Tisza; author: Gergő Tisza):

[mediawiki/extensions/CentralAuth@master] SUL3: Add notice about new login system, with a fallback link

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1118840

Screenshots:

{F58390817}
desktop login	desktop signup	mobile login (Chrome devtools simulated Pixel 7)	mobile signup (Chrome devtools simulated Pixel 7)

Proposed notice text:

We are updating the login system. See here for more information. If something doesn't work, you can use the old one.

Proposed help page text:

We are updating our authentication system to use a single domain name. Before, every Wikimedia wiki had its own login and signup form - if you were logging into the English Wikipedia, you used en.wikipedia.org, for Wikidata you would use www.wikidata.org. To be more compatible with modern browsers, the new system always uses auth.wikimedia.org for showing login and signup forms. The behavior of these forms should be otherwise unchanged.

To find out more about the authentication update project, see mw:MediaWiki Platform Team/SUL3. For technical details, see (TBD). If you want to report a bug, use Phabricator and add the #SUL3 tag. If you are not sure how to do that, you can also use the talk page of this page.

Frequently asked questions:

• How do I know if I can trust this new domain?
• wikimedia.org is operated by the same organization (the Wikimedia Foundation) as Wikipedia, Wikidata etc. You can find a small "Wikimedia project" logo in the footer of the page you started from.

• Why am I / am I not seeing the new login page?
• We are rolling out the changes gradually; see here for the schedule. We are trying our best to make the experience consistent; once you have signed up or logged in using the dedicated domain, we try to always show that domain to you. Because the system needs to make that decision before you enter your username, there are practical limits to how reliably that can work.

• The new login or signup page is not working for me!
• Please describe the issue in detail so we can fix it. In the meanwhile, you can use the old system by clicking the link in the notice on the top of the login / signup form (it will say something like "use the old one").

@JTweed-WMF @Quiddity let me know what you think!

For Tech News: Thanks for the draft! I'd tweak that to: (1) remove the "we" (always ambiguous), and (2) fix the "here" (mystery-meatball link label), plus (3) adding a rough time-scale, and (4) a clear "why/benefits" for the whole project, for folks who don't click-through to the details.
So something roughly like this? (Any tweaks/rewrites, and final-link selections, are still needed please!)

The login system at all Wikimedia wikis is being updated over the next two months. These changes should making logging in more consistent across all wikis, and are also necessary to work with recent web-browser anti-tracking features. You can read more details at the project Help page. During the changeover, if something doesn't work as expected, you can still use the old login system.

@Tgr It looks like 3 of the screenshots might be restricted, as they are not viewable by me; the spots where those should appear are blank, just showing { F-number-here }

Did a couple of mobile screen emulation with Google Chrome dev tools, below are a few screenshots

Ignore the "Wikipedia" logo, that's just my local setup. The focus is the "We are updating the login system. See here for more information. If something doesn't work, you can use the old one." notice.

I've run the suggestion of a notice with fallback link past @mwilliams from Design.

We agreed that a fallback link is not necessary here and that even a notice may be undesirable, as it has the potential to cause confusion especially as it won't be localised as part of rolling out. We feel that, especially given the technical mitigations we are working on (shared credentials, asset links), that finding a saved password or a password reset is a one time minor inconvenience for a small subset of users, which doesn't justify adding a notice.

We do think that adding something to the help is a good idea. I'm happy to pick that up and rework the draft above.

One question for @Quiddity - not all wikis link to the same help page and right now it looks like English Wikipedia links to a generic MediaWiki help page while other wikis have custom pages. What would be normal for us to do here? Just update the generic MediaWiki help page and leave it to communities to update any local pages in their own time if so desired?

I'm less concerned about passwords (users for whom credential sharing between domains doesn't work will have to manually find and copy their password at some point, I don't think letting them delay that makes all that much difference) and more about authentication simply not working for some subset of users for some unforseen reason + about users not understanding why they are seeing an unfamiliar domain (I guess more of an issue for login than for signup).

In T377140#10548971, @DAlangi_WMF wrote:

The focus is the "We are updating the login system. See here for more information. If something doesn't work, you can use the old one." notice.

Note: We should avoid using "here" or "click here" as a link label. (That's known as Mystery meat navigation, and is bad for screenreaders, and for intuitively understanding a link's destination, and for sighted users to see the link at all because "here" is so short in English.) -- I won't attempt to suggest a rewrite immediately, per the uncertainties below.

In T377140#10549303, @JTweed-WMF wrote:

One question for @Quiddity - not all wikis link to the same help page and right now it looks like English Wikipedia links to a generic MediaWiki help page while other wikis have custom pages. What would be normal for us to do here? Just update the generic MediaWiki help page and leave it to communities to update any local pages in their own time if so desired?

Re: If I understand correctly, and after looking around, I think you mean that:

• at Enwiki's Special:UserLogin it links to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Logging_in --
• whereas at Frwiki's Special:UserLogin it links to https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aide:Compte_utilisateur (and similar at some other wikis).

I believe it would be normal for us to simply update the existing official documentation and let the communities update their custom local versions. Potentially we could highlight in Tech News that the main documentation has been overhauled, and that any custom local variants should be updated accordingly.

Question for you (all): Are we planning on updating the existing page (mw:Help:Logging_in), and/or are we planning on creating a new page (i.e. Tgr's earlier draft message links to the currently non-existent m:Help:Single_login_domain)?

Change #1118840 abandoned by Gergő Tisza:

[mediawiki/extensions/CentralAuth@master] SUL3: Add notice about new login system, with a fallback link

Reason:

per task

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1118840