[Mediawiki-l] Twisting the use of namespaces

[Petr Andreyev]

Hi Stéphane,

we had a very similar idea - a wiki with a special namespace (in general, an
area) for students' assignements.
So I'm very interested how things will go in your project.
I started NamespacePermissions for this purpose.

Now I'm thinking that may be namesapces are too heavy indeed.
One could do the following using subpages.

There is a page called Assignements. A subpage one level deeper represents
an assignement (ex. Assignement/Sep06Year2).
Creation of an assignement page automatically creates corresponding groups
and permissions, like NamespacePermissions does so that you may assign a
right to read, modify and create subpages of the assignement. Creation of
assignement pages is also restricted by special permissions.

This can be done easily through an extension. No special web-interface
needed. One-time setup.

Will this work for you??

Petr


2006/8/1, Mader <stephane.mader at gmail.com>:
>
> Hi all
>
> I'm working for a management school, and we want to have groups of
> students
> work together on a common assignment, elaborating and defining a set of
> related subjects and concepts.
>
> Students will share and elaborate their work using a wiki. This wiki is
> meant to be isolated during the time of assignment (searching should only
> yield results from the assignment wiki, editing and so forth should only
> be
> possible by users of the assignment working on that wiki, etc).
>
> The final version of their work could be fed into a common wiki and used
> by
> other students for further assignments or general use.
>
> Groups of students only exist during the time of an assignment and
> throughout the year several assignments involving different student groups
> will live and then disappear.
>
> In this context, creating a database for each assignment/group definitely
> doesn't seem to be the good solution.
> I've had a look at custom namespaces and it seems i could use them to
> materialize a temporary space for a group of students. I understand that
> namespaces are intended to segregate different types of content that may
> exist under the same title, so to some extent this is somewhat twisting
> the
> namespace concept but they seem to be the closest fit for the
> group/assignment idea.
>
> Obviously we're looking for a solution where the customization we will be
> adding will be compatible with future mediawiki releases. It seems to me
> that integrating the namespace permission extension and working with the
> custom namespace manager will get me where i want.
>
> I'll need to develop a few "back office" features to manage
> assignments/users (namespaces/groups) making it easy to create/remove a
> namespace, associate/remove students to/from that namespace.
>
> I'm just starting to get into the internals of mediawiki, so i hope i'm
> not
> missing some essentials here.
> We are going to start developing this group/assignment feature making it
> an
> extension.
>
> I wanted to know if anyone has some thoughts on the namespace direction ?
>
> Thanks
>
> Stéphane
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