[Mediawiki-l] Does this sound like a good strategy for setting up a partially editable site in the way we want?

[Ken McDonald]

I know that there are various approaches to permissions in MW, and it's 
quite possible there may be things I haven't seen in the docs. (My 
primary reference is "Help:User rights"). We're in the final process of 
setting up our site, and I was wondering if more experienced users would 
care to comment on the following rights strategy we've come up with, and 
perhaps offer suggestions.

The initial version of the site will be read-only to all users except 
sysops. This seems easy enough to accomplish with the general 
permissions settings, and then set them again when we have editable 
pages in place.

Some pages will never be editable by users. We don't want to use a 
separate namespace to separate user-editable vs. non-editable content, 
so simply using page protection seems like the way to go. Is there a way 
of batch protecting our initial pages? (Converted from MoinMoin). We 
don't have so many that this is necessary, but it would be nice to avoid 
setting protections for each by hand.

I also notice that my local experimental MW setup (under OS X) seems to 
have a limited range of protections that can be assigned to a page; in 
particular, my protect options only seems to know about sysops, 
unregistered users, and registered users. If I understand correctly, MW 
comes with various other groups (eg. bureaucrats) defined. Is there way 
to protect a a page so that it can, for example, be edited by sysops and 
bureaucrats but not by other users?

And, I would guess that the info in Help:User rights about the fact that 
MW doesn't yet have a special 'edittalk' permission is still accurate? 
It'd be nice to have all talk pages editable by registered users, but 
it's not important enough to us to put in a hack that probably won't be 
compatible with how an edittalk feature is implemented in some future 
release.

That's all, really :-)  Again, please feel free to offer suggestions on 
different ways to do things, other documentation I should read, etc. etc.

Thanks,
Ken