Very good plan!
I am also willing to completly rewrite the rule
system. Instead of
anonymous / logged in / Sysops / Bureaucrate, I am willing to assign
users to groups, each group having rights like "edit, move, special
page, site administration, mediawiki, protecting page ...".
My question here is: How do you plan to manage the target pages?
Do you want to assign permissions of a group to each page? I think
putting pages into groups is more practical than treating them
individually.
There are already the concept of category in wikipedia. We may use
category name as the natural group name for a page and assign user
group's permissions to the page's category rather than the page
itself.
I surveyed and tested other wiki software these days and found
Tikiwiki may be the best for user permission management. eGroupware is
good also for this. Some of them even have interfaces to access LDAP
sever. You may refer their work to design and implement the right one
for wikipedia.
Another thing I want to mention is Mambo Server at
mamboforge.net. I
almost get addicted to trying it those days. It is something like an
web based operating system and you can install and uninstall
components(poll, forum, pic gallery, doc management, online-shop)
conveniently. Some people there are also trying to port wiki into this
flexible framework.
Anyway, keep our eyes open is good for wikipedia for a long run.
--
Be good....