A possible (much simpler) solution would be a human solution: ensure each student has a readily identifiable logon (e.g. johnsmith) and set some editing rules, e.g.: * you may only edit an assignment while you one of those listed to be working on it and then simply keep an eye on edit history and recent changes for anyone breaking the rules. Hugh Prior http://www.chainki.org - dmoz + wiki "Stéphane Mader" <stephane.mader(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:54db1afc0608010604x231347d7j82c8eac7f5c69ce4@mail.gmail.com... Hi all I'm working for a management school, and we want to have groups of students work together on a common assignment, elaborating and defining a set of related subjects and concepts. Students will share and elaborate their work using a wiki. This wiki is meant to be isolated during the time of assignment (searching should only yield results from the assignment wiki, editing and so forth should only be possible by users of the assignment working on that wiki, etc). The final version of their work could be fed into a common wiki and used by other students for further assignments or general use. Groups of students only exist during the time of an assignment and throughout the year several assignments involving different student groups will live and then disappear. In this context, creating a database for each assignment/group definitely doesn't seem to be the good solution. I've had a look at custom namespaces and it seems i could use them to materialize a temporary space for a group of students. I understand that namespaces are intended to segregate different types of content that may exist under the same title, so to some extent this is somewhat twisting the namespace concept but they seem to be the closest fit for the group/assignment idea. Obviously we're looking for a solution where the customization we will be adding will be compatible with future mediawiki releases. It seems to me that integrating the namespace permission extension and working with the custom namespace manager will get me where i want. I'll need to develop a few "back office" features to manage assignments/users (namespaces/groups) making it easy to create/remove a namespace, associate/remove students to/from that namespace. I'm just starting to get into the internals of mediawiki, so i hope i'm not missing some essentials here. We are going to start developing this group/assignment feature making it an extension. I wanted to know if anyone has some thoughts on the namespace direction ? Thanks Stéphane

Hi Stéphane, we had a very similar idea - a wiki with a special namespace (in general, an area) for students' assignements. So I'm very interested how things will go in your project. I started NamespacePermissions for this purpose. Now I'm thinking that may be namesapces are too heavy indeed. One could do the following using subpages. There is a page called Assignements. A subpage one level deeper represents an assignement (ex. Assignement/Sep06Year2). Creation of an assignement page automatically creates corresponding groups and permissions, like NamespacePermissions does so that you may assign a right to read, modify and create subpages of the assignement. Creation of assignement pages is also restricted by special permissions. This can be done easily through an extension. No special web-interface needed. One-time setup. Will this work for you?? Petr 2006/8/1, Mader <stephane.mader(a)gmail.com>om>: