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Help pages
Unified login
Shortcut
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.
Register 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
User preferences
are local, although the email address only needs to be set and confirmed in one place. You can continue to have different preferences on different sites. It is possible however to set global preferences if you so wish.
Blocks
are local, meaning that users blocked on one wiki can still edit other wikis, unless otherwise blocked by an administrator on that wiki. However, if an account is
globally locked
or
globally blocked
, then that applies to all wikis.
Users can still have differently named accounts on two sites; however, these accounts cannot be linked together into one global account.
The global account system is only available for open Wikimedia projects; sites which run on the MediaWiki software but are not operated by the Foundation will continue to have separate account systems, even if they installed
CentralAuth
extension, which is responsible for the unified login system.
Wikitech
In February 2025,
Wikitech was migrated to SUL
. After the migration was complete, developer accounts are no longer required to edit pages on Wikitech.
Frequently asked questions
Can my global username be renamed?
Yes. You can request renames by using
this form
or by placing a request at
Steward requests/Username changes
, where a steward or a global renamer will look into your request. See the
global rename policy
for details.
I have two or more accounts with different names. Can they be merged into one account?
If they're on different wikis, then it is theoretically possible to merge them into one global account with a consistent name, but the process is complicated and rarely done. If they are on the same wiki, then it is outright not possible to merge accounts.
Will I have autoconfirmed status on other wikis?
No. You will have to wait the appropriate amount of time and do the appropriate amount of edits after first logging into each particular wiki, before getting autoconfirmed status.
Can I merge accounts from restricted-account-creation wikis?
No, this is not possible.
Fishbowl
and
private wikis
are not part of the Unified Login system and use their own separate accounts.
Why does my login fail on another Wikimedia wiki after I have logged in?
This is not a failure of the unified login system, it is typically a related issue of a browser preventing the login through restricting cookies being set for your login.
Noting that each sister set of wikis has a different base domain name,
eg. wikipedia.org, wikimedia.org, wikisource.org
, etc. and the cookies are set accordingly. If your login constantly fails, you should consider lodging a
Phabricator
bug report.
Notes
Global preferences
User groups
Local
groups
On Meta
Without global effects
Account creators
Autopatrollers
Bots
Bureaucrats
CheckUsers
Community Wishlist managers
Confirmed users
Event organizers
Flood flag
Importers
IP block exemptions
Users blocked from the IP Information tool
Oversighters
Patrollers
Transwiki importers
Temporary account IP viewers
Uploaders
With global effects
Administrators
Central notice administrators
Global renamers
Interface administrators
MassMessage senders
OAuth administrators
Push subscription managers
Translation administrators
WMF Office IT
WMF Trust and Safety
On some wikis
Uploaders
Autopatrollers
Patrollers
Reviewers
Rollbackers
Autochecked users
Extended confirmed users
File movers
Interface editors
Abuse filter editors
Template editors
Eliminators
Translation administrators
MassMessage senders
Arbitration committee members
Extended movers
Bots with administrator rights
Flooders
Curators
Election clerks
On one wiki
(except Meta)
Noratelimit accounts
Engineers
Upload Wizard campaign editors
Image reviewers
Test wiki administrators
Property creators
Wikidata staff
Researchers
IP block exemption grantors
Movers
Functioneers
Maintainers
Wikifunctions staff
On all wikis
Blocked users
Unregistered users
Newly-registered users
Registered users
Confirmed users
Autoconfirmed users
Account creators
Bots
Administrators
Interface administrators
Bureaucrats
Oversighters
CheckUsers
IP block exemptions
Importers
Transwiki importers
Temporary account IP viewers
Users blocked from the IP Information tool
Structured Discussions bots
Historical groups
Extended uploaders
Course coordinators, Instructors, Online volunteers and Campus volunteers
ZeroRatedMobileAccess administrators
WMF ops monitoring
GWToolset users
Global
groups
Locked accounts
Unified accounts
Abuse filter helpers
Abuse filter maintainers
API high limit requestors
CAPTCHA exemptions
Founder
Global bots
Global deleters
Global Flow creators
Global interface editors
Global IP block exemptions
Global rollbackers
Global sysops
Global temporary account IP viewers
New wikis importers
Ombuds
Recursive export
Staff
Stewards
System administrators
U4C members
VRT permissions agents
wmf-email-block-override
WMF researchers
Links in
italic
are separate account statuses that are not assigned through user groups.
See also:
Wikimedia user groups
Retrieved from "
Categories
User groups
Unified login
Handbook Wikimedia-specific
Security
Help
Unified login
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