Thread:Help talk:OAuth/OAuth with no actions?/reply

Hi Dnaber,

You can retrieve a user's username using the API. The query you can use for this is:

That said, I suspect what you're actually asking me is "Can my website somehow use OAuth as an authentication method, so that users can sign in using their Wikipedia credentials?". The answer to that is that you can, but you shouldn't. If it's being used for authentication, the OAuth protocol is susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. The use of HTTPS mitigates that somewhat, but the vulnerability is still theoretically there. We'd highly recommend not using OAuth for authentication.

We're exploring the possibility of making Wikimedia wikis an OpenID provider which would allow you to use Wikimedia credentials for authorisation. We don't know if or when we'll start working on that, though.

Please let me know if you need any more information.