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Help:Unified login

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H:UL
Your Wikimedia global account (sometimes called Wikimedia Unified Login or SUL/single user login) is your single username reserved across all Wikimedia sister projects. This gives you a consistent identity throughout Wikimedia, enables features like global user pages, reduces vectors for impersonation, and helps you stay automatically logged-in across many wikis. You can also manually log in to any public Wikimedia wiki with your global account.

About global accounts

What it is

The Wikimedia Foundation operates many editable wikis in many languages. Early in Wikimedia's history, users had to create separate user accounts on each wiki. This made it more difficult to participate across many wikis, especially as Wikimedia Commons made multimedia integration more essential and Wikidata became the central wiki for interwiki links. Unified login was made available on an opt-in basis in 2008 and was enacted for all users from 2013-2015.

Your global account solves these problems by reserving your name on all wikis (so nobody else can impersonate you), and automatically creating your local account when you visit a wiki you've never visited before.

You can use Special:CentralAuth to view details about your global account. The email address and password you configure on Special:Preferences will be used on all wikis. This means that you will be able to log into any public Wikimedia project with just one single username and password.

What it changes

Registering a username on any public Wikimedia wiki automatically reserves that name on all the others; this means different users can no longer register with the same account name on different wikis. Users only need to set and confirm their email address in one account. Changing the password in any wiki changes it in all wikis accordingly. Special:UserLogin now logs the user in to every unified wiki simultaneously, noting that navigating away from the login page before it is fully loaded may result in incomplete login (i.e. this uses JavaScript and users may not log in to all wikis successfully).

Additional wikis will be added to the user's login the first time they are visited, and a local account will be created on that wiki. For example, a regular user at Commons and German Wikipedia does not automatically login to English Wikibooks, but if that user visits English Wikibooks once while logged in, they will then log in to English Wikibooks each time (to see which wikis you have logged into, see Special:CentralAuth).

What it doesn't change

  • Some things are still local:
    • User rights are mostly local, which means that administrators do not have administrator access everywhere. Global groups such as global rollback, global sysop, global interface editors and global IP block exemption can be requested at Steward requests/Global permissions.