On 8/29/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
On 30/08/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 10:18:12PM +0100, Rob Church wrote:
The referenced bug is a long standing feature request that we don't have plans to implement, owing to the fact that it contradicts a lot of the "ethos" of MediaWiki; its purpose and concept.
Sure.
Just like groups. And read-protection by groups. :-)
Groups became a necessary evil. Read protection in MediaWiki is limited in implementation, which is a Good Thing, in my opinion.
People often seem to confuse MediaWiki with a magic solve-all for document management. While the platform is popular, quite mature and secure, and extremely extensible, and while MediaWiki is a pretty damn good collaborative editing application, it is subject to an enormous amount of abuse.
You have a pot of screws and a hammer. Purchase a screwdriver.
Rob Church _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I have a real document management system. Several, in fact.
I also have a Wiki at (place I contract at) Work (Twiki), and at (contracting company I work for) Work (MediaWiki, in deployment now).
In both of those cases, the ability to ensure that non-employees aren't using the collaboration tools (Wiki, document management software, internal websites, internal sysadmin tools) is not only good business sense, but is at one of those locations a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audit control.
Wikis are just as useful in environments where complete freedom of data access is not acceptable from a business standpoint. The employee community may be smaller than "everyone in the world", but the type and quality of interaction within the community can be helped greatly by Wikis and other modern internet collaboration.
"All information should be free!" likely does not extend as far as "...including your 401K manager's internal security data and all your health records", even for die-hard info-libertarians.
Some of these environments will benefit from Wikis; many of them will require additional access control. It's unreasonable to expect that MediaWiki would never find itself installed in such a situation.