User:Etesp/Third party priorities

Brief introduction: I've been playing with MediaWiki for a few years, both helping out on projects which caught my interest (I'm an operator on WikiApiary) and setting up/running a couple of wikis. I'm interested in helping make mediawiki more friendly to third party users, and feel that there's some relatively low-hanging fruit which would vastly improve the experience of setting up and maintaining a MW install.

Single Sign On
A large proportion of successful of wikis are created on the back of existing communities, which often have accounts based on forum or wordpress software. Ideally these users find themselves already logged in using existing accounts, but in the cases where SSO is not implemented the extra activation energy required when each user must reregister before being able to contribute is a significant dampener on active participation, the fact that the user accounts are not automatically tied together means some users end up using different names on different parts of the site, and dealing with the often necessarily strict anti-spam filters is another blow to editor retention.

In short, having SSO is a big deal and making it easy to set up+user friendly should be a high priority.

The problems
Good news: There are ways of signing into mediawiki with existing accounts from the most popular software. Bad news: Existing SSO extensions are very hard to find, often struggle with MediaWiki's unusual username requirements, and are poorly maintained/incompatible with modern MW (often in a "get code after crawling google then apply five+ so bug fixes scattered through a fifty page thread and hope" way)

This could be helped by:
 * Collecting up all relevant SSO extensions (including ones posted publicly elsewhere) and making it easy to tell what's available and linking to them from some setup guides ("if you have existing users, use one of these.")
 * Communicating relevant changes directly to major forum providers to help reduce breakage with updates
 * Having good MW integration is a notable selling point for forums, make it easy for them and they may well work to keep things better updated
 * Creating a setting which makes MediaWiki support lowercase first letters, avoiding potential name collision issues