Those tabs at the top of a page in default MediaWiki installations interfere with my design goals. In general, I want pages to focus on the content of pages, not on the function of a site or of a "community." I nixed the "view source" tab which appears for the vast majority of users who will not have edit access, though that control of access is still dependent on page protection instead of on granular permissions. Eventually I will move most article development into protected namespaces, or use another approach to regulation editorial access.
The glitch now is that pesky "history" tab. The vast majority of readers who see a tab that says "history" over an article about baseball, for example, will expect that tab to lead to information about the history of baseball, not to a page of unfathomable links to "cur" and "Talk" and "contribs".
Now, it's not that I don't need version control. That's why I selected MediaWiki -- it provides for version control and for shared editorial access. I just don't need to wear my choice in software on my sleeve.
My question is, has anyone developed other schema for rendering these tabs? A left column placement would be an easy way to reduce the visibility of the tags, but that doesn't settle ambiguity about what they mean, and it doesn't negate the implication that version control (history) is relevant to the average user. My first best option would be to have the history tab appear only for those with edit privileges on that page. If I go that route, I'll probably find a way to revise it as I plod along through revising the "edit" tab logic.
I query here because I doubt I am the only one to have used MediaWiki for other purposes than to promote the idea that "anybody can edit." Are there other working schemas in circulation for rendering these tabs?