1. This should solve your problem: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Preventing_Access Simply prevent anonymous editing and prevent new registrations (otherwise any Internet surfer could just register themselves). Then appoint a person (or a number of persons) who will be responsible for manually creating accounts for anybody who you want to be able to edit. All of these measures are described on the meta page as per the above link.
2. Your needs (which are easily solved by implementing the instructions as per the above link) probably differ significantly from the Wikipedia community's needs for an approval mechanism. One reason why they differ is that there isn't consensus yet within the Wikipedia community on just what kind of an approval mechanism (if any) we want. Incidentally, I am going to present a detailed proposal on this here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Wikimedia_meetup_2005#Possible_speakers_and_workshops Consensus on and implementation of a Wikipedia approval mechanism may be some time off (and, again, may differ significantly from your needs).
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
On 1 Oct 2004, at 04:02, Randy Becker wrote:
I'm a high school student involved in our website (http://www.rileyhighschool.com/). After taking a look at the sorry state of our site, and subsequently visiting wikipedia, I came to the realization that a wiki, especially mediawiki, would be enormously beneficial to our site in many ways. I investigated further, installed 1.3, got some content in, customized monobook a little bit, got familiar with the software. I decided that it really would be a great improvement, and continued further testing. Upon further review, and in conversation with the administration, it was determined that the principal objection to using mediawiki as our primary site was that anyone could edit. Although it has been presented that this is not a serious problem in practice, it was still too much of a risk for them to take. Downtrodden, but not discouraged, knowing that mediawiki is an open source product, and being familiar with php and mysql, I looked further into what was available. Ultimately, it was determined that unapproved edits cannot come to exist in the first place, irregardless of the ease of their removal. I began looking for a way to implement an approval mechanism.
On #mediawiki it was suggested that I look into the recent changes patrolling in 1.4 as a potential method of implementing this solution. I have done this and determined that it will be just as difficult to use this as it will be to implement a cleaner solution, involving a new table in the database and an approval mechanism. Therefore, I'm here to ask for suggestions, comments, and help implementing this, or a similarly acceptable solution.
-Randy _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l