From my experience, the reason MediaWiki is attractive is scalability and reliability. There's a lot of wikis that can provide the protection features needed, but they just aren't built to scale to thousands of users and 50K+ nodes. It's a lot easier to hack access restrictions and features onto a scalable architecture than it is to make a non-scalable but feature rich app scale.

I can understand why Wikipedia developers would be reluctant to add it- they don't need it. There is a side argument though- that if MediaWiki is used in more settings, people will write extensions and improvements for it, some of which WikiMedia can use. Wether this would be enough to be worth the tradeoff is hard to say.

From Brion's comments though, if people were to produce docs (or better- code) to implement such a control mechanism, you would at least consider it for mainline?

Gabe

-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jej Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 1:48 AM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Page access restiction (resend)

It seems that many people need this feature. Since I published this patch (http://conseil-recherche-innovation.net/index.php/1974/04/11/41-restrict-pag...), we have 25% of visits on this single article. Generaly people need restriction feature to manage small wikis, private intranets. I guess they choose mediawiki for the syntax, templates, and reliabilty/community support, and not for the ability to manage projects as big as wikipedia nor encyclopedies.

From a wikipedia point of view, I think nobody wants more restriction features (protect is enough). We cannot polute the core of MW with features not useful for WP, it's difficult to maintain patches for ages, and it's not necessary to carry WP specific features in a forked project. So my choice would be a fifth... E. To write some specifications from needs, abstract the problem, and start a new project :) Any ideas ?!...

Read you, Jej

Asking again...

If someone were to get gung-ho about implementing access control measures in MediaWiki that go way beyond the immediate needs of Wikipedia, would you prefer that that person/group:

A. Submit patches for inclusion in mainline MediaWiki B. Submit patches to extend the MediaWiki core to allow for a security layer C. Submit patches to modularize/wrap some MediaWiki components (e.g. the parser) in a way that they can be used as libraries for an otherwise forked/rewritten wiki product D. Fork MediaWiki

Curious Robla

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