I am a physicist, currently working on a project to make LIGO environmental data available to high school students and their teachers to support inquiry-driven investigations (called "e-Labs"), for a project called Interactions in Understanding the Universe (I2U2). We are using MediaWiki for this project.

I'm also in the process of setting up a new web site for QuarkNet which is a professional development program for science teachers, run by the Education and Outreach office at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). That site also uses MediaWiki.

Before working on I2U2 I was part of the team that set up Einstein@Home, a BOINC project which allows people to donate the spare cycles on their PC or Mac to search for evidence of gravitational waves, all while displaying a nifty screensaver. To prepare for the design, development and deployment of Einstein@Home I had previously set up another BOINC project for testing, called Pirates@Home. I added a MediaWiki glossary to Pirates@Home and have used it as a test-bed for single sign-on between the BOINC and wiki components.

The result of all this is a MediaWiki extension for cross-authentication to the wiki based on prior authentication to the BOINC project: Extension:BOINC_Authentication.

I found reading the SSL and Shibboleth extensions useful reference examples for this. I've included extensive comments both to help me keep track of what's going on and to help anybody else who's interested.


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