- I see from the LocalSettings.php that it is possible to prevent access to certain pages for users who are not logged in. Do I need to list all the pages I want blocked or is it possible to do wildcards eg internal*
Actually, you need to explicitly list all the pages you want to allow access to. I don't really recommend using this mode, but if it does what you want it's there...
Does MediaWiki have any concept of groups? ie Would it be possible to define different groups and give different page's ownerships to a certain group so that only users that belonged to that group could edit it? Maybe it's just my Unix background but I think the concept of user and group permissions is a powerful one that is beneficial to use.