Hey all,
My original question was posed on my blog. http://brainscat.com/archives/2004/08/04/mediawiki-permissions Hopefully, somebody knows an answer... :)
This is a plea for help regarding the MediaWiki permissions model. I spent the majority of all last night looking for a way to have an open wiki with certain pages that weren’t viewable by anyone except sysops. I know you can lock a page from editing, but I need certain pages to be invisible.
The closest I could find was a whitelist scheme. For my purposes though, the whitelist scheme would be far too hard to update, as my number of public pages is far greater than private pages and maintaining a whitelist would be too time consuming.
Are there ways to do one of the following?
* Namespace the default set of documents and whitelist them, whilecreating a different namespace for the private pages? * Manage a blacklist of pages? Or blacklist a namespace?
Any answer I find will be posted here and on MediaWiki for posterity, and will be greatly appreciated.
Best, ~Tor
I can think of one possibility:
Create two wikis and use interwiki links between the two of them. The ones that you wish to keep private could be protected by .htaccess authentication, requiring a password.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem easy to modify the list of recognized interwiki links in MediaWiki. I know in TikiWiki there was an admin page for this, but MediaWiki doesn't have one. All I could find was a page where you can suggest sites to be added into the next release of the code! Someone asked in the Talk page how to do this yourself, but there is no answer. (Sorry to have so many references to TikiWiki. I hate its bloat, which is why I'm now using MediaWiki, but some of the many features it had are really quite useful - especially for configuring your own setup.)
Cheers,
kerim
On Aug 4, 2004, at 12:44 PM, Tor Bjornrud wrote:
Hey all,
My original question was posed on my blog. http://brainscat.com/archives/2004/08/04/mediawiki-permissions Hopefully, somebody knows an answer... :)
This is a plea for help regarding the MediaWiki permissions model. I spent the majority of all last night looking for a way to have an open wiki with certain pages that weren’t viewable by anyone except sysops. I know you can lock a page from editing, but I need certain pages to be invisible.
The closest I could find was a whitelist scheme. For my purposes though, the whitelist scheme would be far too hard to update, as my number of public pages is far greater than private pages and maintaining a whitelist would be too time consuming.
Are there ways to do one of the following?
* Namespace the default set of documents and whitelist them,while creating a different namespace for the private pages? * Manage a blacklist of pages? Or blacklist a namespace?
Any answer I find will be posted here and on MediaWiki for posterity, and will be greatly appreciated.
Best, ~Tor
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Create two wikis and use interwiki links between the two of them.
I think this would be quite possible, though slightly tedious. If there's no alternative, I may have to do this, or use TikiWiki... I'm going on a limb here, but I would think that the management of one tikiwiki would be easier than two mediawikis...
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem easy to modify the list of recognized interwiki links in MediaWiki. I know in TikiWiki there was an admin page for this, but MediaWiki doesn't have one.
I've seen some work on interwiki links here... http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_links though it seems poorly explained.
It also briefly mentions interlanguage links.
Are languages handled through separate installs of mediawiki and then interwiki linked, or are the languages defined within the same wiki? Basically, could I define my own "language", and then allow only english pages to be viewed by all users?
P. Kerim friedman wrote:
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem easy to modify the list of recognized interwiki links in MediaWiki. I know in TikiWiki there was an admin page for this, but MediaWiki doesn't have one. All I could find was a page where you can suggest sites to be added into the next release of the code!
There's not currently an admin page for it, but you can edit the list directly in the database.
To add a new prefix:
INSERT INTO interwiki VALUES('prefix', 'http://the.url/wiki/$1');
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Tor Bjornrud wrote:
Are there ways to do one of the following?
* Namespace the default set of documents and whitelist them, whilecreating a different namespace for the private pages? * Manage a blacklist of pages? Or blacklist a namespace?
There is not currently a blacklist feature, but it should be easy to hack in. In Title.php there is this function:
function userCanRead() { global $wgUser; global $wgWhitelistRead; if( 0 != $wgUser->getID() ) return true; if( !is_array( $wgWhitelistRead ) ) return true; $name = $this->getPrefixedText(); if( in_array( $name, $wgWhitelistRead ) ) return true; # Compatibility with old settings if( $this->getNamespace() == NS_MAIN ) { if( in_array( ":" . $name, $wgWhitelistRead ) ) return true; } return false; }
A blacklist will be the opposite of the whitelist:
if( in_array( $name, $wgBlacklistRead ) ) return false;
Or a namespace blacklist might look like:
if( in_array( $this->getNamespace(), $wgBlacklistNs ) ) { return false; }
However be careful; MediaWiki is designed for open access, and there may be numerous ways around the poorly tested, little-used access control features. I would not recommend relying on them for any purpose; if you have information you wish to keep private, the best way is to keep it completely separate from a public wiki database and use HTTP authentication to control access at the highest level.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Aug 4, 2004, at 2:37 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
Tor Bjornrud wrote:
Are there ways to do one of the following?
* Namespace the default set of documents and whitelist them,while creating a different namespace for the private pages? * Manage a blacklist of pages? Or blacklist a namespace?
There is not currently a blacklist feature, but it should be easy to hack in. In Title.php there is this function:
function userCanRead() { global $wgUser; global $wgWhitelistRead; if( 0 != $wgUser->getID() ) return true; if( !is_array( $wgWhitelistRead ) ) return true; $name = $this->getPrefixedText(); if( in_array( $name, $wgWhitelistRead ) ) return true; # Compatibility with old settings if( $this->getNamespace() == NS_MAIN ) { if( in_array( ":" . $name, $wgWhitelistRead ) ) return true; } return false; }
A blacklist will be the opposite of the whitelist:
if( in_array( $name, $wgBlacklistRead ) ) return false;
Or a namespace blacklist might look like:
if( in_array( $this->getNamespace(), $wgBlacklistNs ) ) { return false; }
However be careful; MediaWiki is designed for open access, and there may be numerous ways around the poorly tested, little-used access control features. I would not recommend relying on them for any purpose; if you have information you wish to keep private, the best way is to keep it completely separate from a public wiki database and use HTTP authentication to control access at the highest level.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Thanks a ton, Brion. This is pretty much what I was looking for, and I'll hack something together... maybe even get it merged into future versions.
Thankfully, what I need to keep separate is not top-secret stuff, and it wouldn't be all that terrible if people stumbled upon it.
Best, ~Tor
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