Hoi, MediaWiki is a versatile tool. Gartner wrote at some stage: "Knowledge management became affordable thanks to the MediaWiki boys". The point being, yes it is a wiki engine at its core, it is however used in many settings. There have been several requests for per-page access permissions. There have been implementations of this. They just did not make it into the MediaWiki SVN. This is a shame because as a consequence you have a fork. Forking is really unproductive. With some regularity the same issue raises its ugly head again; often resulting in a new fork. Thanks, GerardM
If someone was able to implement this as an extension, without modifying core code, then they might have a better chance of making it into SVN.
If such a thing existed, under a suitable license (etc etc), as an _extension_ only, then I for one would be happy to check it in to SVN.
Others may then decide to delete it (probably on the grounds that "it was against user freedoms") ... and no doubt the irony inherent in restricting what was in MediaWiki's extension SVN, so as to "increase freedoms" would be completely lost of such people. Interventionist nanny-state fascists! :-)
Part of freedom is the freedom to decide for yourself what you want to happen on your systems. For example, Linux lets me encrypt my private personal data so that others cannot access it. Is this "against user freedoms"? If not, why should wikis be different?
Brion has strongly implied that in the past. That's what WONTFIX means: not that we aren't willing to code it, but that we aren't even willing to accept it. But it's his decision, of course.
An unequivocal answer to this would be good, because it's a recurring question which isn't going away.
Brion, would you refuse to allow a patch for per-page ACLs on political (rather than technical) reasons? I.e. if the code was clean, it was off by default, it had little or no overhead if you weren't using it, most of it was in an extension, with only limited changes to the core where required, the license was acceptable, it was used at a number of sites, it fulfilled a user need / desire, there didn't seem to be any security problems, the patch's developers were communicate and responsive, it used the same coding style as other code, was well-commented and documented, etc etc - Would you revert such a patch: Yes or No?
All the best, Nick.