Gabriele Barberi wrote:

Hello, I'm running mediawiki 1.5.0 and I would like to have four groups (sysop, bureaucrat, developers, contributors) where:

• sysop has full privileges;
• bureaucrat has almost full privileges (can create new users, edit and

add new pages, but cannot modify pages owned by sysops);

• developers can add new pages and modify them but only on their own

projects;

• contributors can only modify some pages.

In order to allow future upgrades I prefer not to install patches not officially provided by mediawiki.org.

Could someone tell me how to do it?

You can't; MediaWiki has no support for restricting things per-namespace at this time, and quite possibly never will.

The whole point of a wiki is that internal access controls are minimized, so anyone can get right to work at what they need. A full revision history means incorrect or unauthorized edits can easily be reverted -- this goes double or more if this is an internal environment where you have a disciplinary structure.

If you really require this kind of strict control over the web site access permissions, MediaWiki is not the right software for you. Instead of fighting against software that will constantly try to steer you in another direction, you should look for a content-management system with a built-in permissions system that suits your needs.

I would also like to create new projects/namespaces with subpages, but the documentation on meta.mediawiki.org is not clear about it. How should I do it?

Subpages are pretty limited in what they can do, and may not be appropriate for what you're trying to do.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)