Lane, Ryan wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:
Another good reason for a good security system for talk pages is because this software is used by a lot of other people than just the wikipedia sites, and I've heard from quite a bit of them that they wish the software had this type of feature.
if they need these kinds of features, MediaWiki is probably not the most suitable software for them to use. the software was written by and mostly for the WMF's sites, and its general direction is toward openness and being a wiki. the existence of page protection should not be taken as a sign that supporting strict access control everywhere is desired as a feature.
if/when the WMF sites require new features in this direction (article validation, for example) the software will adapt to offer them; as we don't yet know what will be needed, there's not much gain from writing it--see Magnus's article validation implementation, for example.
Ryan Lane Naval Oceanographic Office
kate.