MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org writes:
A quick grep for the wgWhitelistRead variable shows that it doesnt exist in any other files but Local and Default settings, and thus is never checked anywhere. The language files contain a "you need to be logged in to read" text, but the functionality seems totally missing.
Any ideas?
I have implemented use of '$wgWhitelistRead' in the wiki code but it may not have been included in a release candidate yet. It should be available in the head CVS revision (use at your own risk), on SourceForge.
In my implementation, you set '$wgWhitelistRead' to an array of values of the form "namespace:articleName", each of which is an article a user may see without actually logging in. For example
$wgWhitelistRead = array ( ":Main_Page", "Special:Userlogin", "Wikipedia:Help");
If the user goes to any other article, they are given a message that they must login first to see the page they've gone to.
Note that "Special:Userlogin" has to be included in the list, otherwise a user could never log in. As a debugging aid, I put an invisible HTML comment in the error page with the identifier of the article the user was trying to reach.
Nick Pisarro