[Mediawiki-l] hiding and sharing articles/namespaces to the public

[revansx at cox.net]

Dear mediawiki admin experts,

I have a configuration goal for my installation of mediawiki that might technically only be a web-server related modification, but I am convinced that the solution (if it is even possible) will requires the advanced insights of this group of experts. Here's the situation: I have set-up a mediawiki (1.6.10) on a dedicated company server (Red Hat, Apache 2.0.52) which uniformly (www and intranet) limits browser accessibility to users who have a company username and password which they are required to provide to the browser in order to view the wiki articles. wiki user-accounts for authoring are handled by the LDAP module. This part all works great. --- The problem is --- that I am now being asked if it is possible to make certain pages "publicly" accessible and not protected behind a secure browser authentication against the company's domain (after we've gone to such excellent lengths to protect all of the content!!!) I am being asked if specific articles and/or all of the articles in certain namespace can be made to be an exception to our global restrictions on who can "see" the articles. A specific example is the "Main Page" and any of the User's pages. So, does anyone know how to configure a mediawiki such that "some" pages require secure browser authentication even just to see them? If so, the ideal solution would behave such that new pages are created inaccessible from the public by default. --- sincerest thanks all. - Rich (revansx)