[Mediawiki-l] Re: groups

Fri Sep 30 00:00:43 UTC 2005

We at Washignton State University have adopted a middle position between
completely open wiki like Wikipedia and a content management system with
per-page access controls.

Right now, our version of MediaWiki (based on 1.4.7) has editing only for
logged-in users.  We use an external LDAP (Active Directory, actually) for
authentication, and do auto-account-creation in MW on a first-time
successful login.  This means that any known user in our AD can log in with
their AD username and password, then edit any page (except the usual
protected pages).

Additionally, we made a small patch so that the logged-in user is the only
one who can edit his/her User: page (and any subpages).  This means that
users have a "personal" space to write in, as well as the "community
property" main namespace.  This patch is documented in meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Yeidel

-- Joshua

On 9/29/05 1:00 PM, "Benoit Brosseau" <brosseaub at mancomm.ca> wrote:

> 
>> Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:37:00 -0400
>> From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] groups
>> To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
>> <mediawiki-l at wikimedia.org>
>> Message-ID: <deb2337a050929123775c93531 at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>> 
>> On 9/29/05, Benoit Brosseau <brosseaub at mancomm.ca> wrote:
>>  
>> 
>>> ok i am new to this so bare with me
>>>    
>>> 
>> 
>> If you want to strip, feel free, but I'll keep my clothes on thanks.
>> 
>>  
>> 
>>> i have a class that i want to use mediawiki for
>>> 
>>> i have 4 groups of students
>>> 
>>> how do i set it up so :
>>> 
>>> anyone can read all the content
>>> 
>>> only members of the group can edit the group pages
>>> 
>>> only members can leave comments
>>>    
>>> 
>> 
>> You really can't. It sounds like you are looking for a contents
>> management system and not a wiki.
>> 
>> Mediawiki (like Ward Cunningham's wikiwiki web, and all the wikis in
>> between is designed around the philosophy that anyone can edit, and
>> everyone will police the result. It only supports very broad sets of
>> capabilities for users, and doesn't really support a permissions model
>> on individual artifacts.
>> 
>> Such questions come up here often, because users always want to warp
>> software to meet their own ends. But as neat as mediawiki is as a wiki
>> implementation, it's really not a good base for a restrictive content
>> management system.
>> 
>> --
>> Rick DeNatale
>> 
>> Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site
>> http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/
>> 
>>  
>> 
> First let me apologies in advence for any typo since i am not a native
> english speaker
> 
> second WOW if what you say is true its very wierd ... while i am new to
> mediawiki i am not new to wikis. i have implemented wiki with 700 nurses
> using pmwiki and its easy (well not really) to do groups and implement
> ownership of pages so pepole can only edit a restricted set of pages. i
> understand the wiki philosophy and i runed completely open wikis for
> years but the probleme is that spam is getting so bad its rough to
> manage. The content would get replace, new page get created with links
> to porn site and while this is ok for most technology oriented pepole
> because they know they can just rool back to the last good version its
> confusing for the users and down right no acceptable in a school contexte.
> 
> i really like mediawiki but if it can support basic groups i will have
> to convince them to switch to pmwiki or usemod or sommething that
> support groups
> 
> thanks for your help
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