[Mediawiki-l] User-less wiki?

Mon Oct 18 12:12:36 UTC 2004

On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 11:49:12AM -0500, Paul Fierro wrote:
> 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
> 

Is really a wiki you're needing? There are several no-wiki sites using
the content of wikipedia, e.g http://www.fact-index.com/ or
and http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/ (this has a interesting
feature: when you pass mouse over a link to anothe page, the firts lines
of content of the linked page is shown. This would be interesting to be
implemented in mediawiki).

-Riba 