[Mediawiki-l] Re: groups

Fri Sep 30 01:18:14 UTC 2005

On 9/29/05, 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

Controlling access to keep out unauthorized users is one way to combat
wiki spammers. Using other tools like the the spam blacklist extension
is another.

But that's a completely different matter from partitioning the
artifacts within the wiki and giving permissions to different groups
of users, which is what you seem to be asking for.

Mediawiki was designed, and is being developed, to support the
wikimedia projects, such as wikipedia, which need to allow open access
with minimal administration overhead, because of the sheer scale of
the contributor community. For the most part wikipedia is self
policing, which depends on open access so that ordinary users can
correct problems as they see them, which is the wiki way.

People who really require finer grained control over the permisions to
individual artifacts should expect the mediawiki developers to put
those requirements high on their list. If PMwiki or another code base
meets your needs then use it.

I'm really not trying to be critical, just realistic.

--
Rick DeNatale

Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site
http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/