[Mediawiki-l] User-less wiki?

Fri Oct 15 16:49:12 UTC 2004

We want to use the Wikipedia database in a public project, wrapping it in
our own skin using MediaWiki as (more or less) middleware. In order to keep
our MediaWiki customizations to a minimum, we've been focusing on modifying
index.php to do the dirty work.

What we're looking for is a simple way to have a user-less, read-only wiki.
Since our content comes from the Wikipedia database, and we don't want to be
involved in accepting submissions or moderation, we will be directing all
edits and contributions to wikipedia.org. Because of this, we have no need
for users and such.

We expect to direct a fairly high amount of traffic to wikipedia.org as our
project will be deployed on a network of very high traffic sites.

I've stripped out the login box from the template and prevented such pages
as [[Special::Userlogin]] from displaying, even if one knows enough about
MediaWiki to munge our URLs. Furthermore, no pages that are not in the Main
NS will display. I have this functioning with MediaWiki 1.3.6, but I've been
working on it since 1.2.5. Unfortunately (for me), as MediaWiki matures, I
find myself coding around its changes - for example when
$wgValidSpecialPagesEn disappeared from Language.php in 1.3.0, I could no
longer rely on this array.

What I'm proposing is one or more settings in LocalSettings.php (or
something equally straightforward) that will enable MediaWiki to operate in
a read-only, no-user mode. Naturally, I will offer any help to achieve this.

What do you think, MediaWiki developers?

Paul