On Tue Jan 27 2015 at 6:17:35 PM chris tharp tharpenator@gmail.com wrote:
Chad -- why would Mediawiki be the wrong tool if someone wanted to exercise some form of access control? Considering the number of extensions that have created for different types of access control it seems to be a very popular desire. Just because someone desires access control doesn't mean that they don't want the wiki experience elsewhere in their website -- they just don't want it on every page.
There's lots of extensions. Doesn't mean they're all good ideas ;-) Wikis are meant to be open and all pages in a namespace should be equal. When they're not, that's what protection is for.
(Implicitly Mediawiki developers agree with this philosophy since all Mediawiki Namespace pages on every wiki have access control).
Sure, per-namespace edit permissions make sense. Because not all namespaces are equal. NS_MEDIAWIKI can damage the site so it's restricted by default. I totally could respect an argument for a wiki protected NS_TEMPLATE or NS_MODULE in the same manner.
Strangely the only type of access control build into Mediawiki is a top-down centralized type of access control, which is strange when you think about it. Everyone agrees some type of access control needs to build into the software, but Mediawiki, out of the package, only allows a top-down centralized approach. Others just want more varied types of access control than the off-the-shelf model presented inside a standard Mediawiki.
Sure, access controls make sense for different actions or namespaces (see above). I just think per-page ACLs are incompatible with the idea of a wiki and there are other tools better suited for the job.
-Chad