[Mediawiki-l] status of permissions

[Alex]

Iv Ray wrote:
> Thomas Dalton schrieb:
>> What is it precisely you are trying to do? MediaWiki has quite a
>> sophisticated permissions system, the main thing it can't do (at least
>> not reliably) is make different parts of a wiki visible to different
>> people (beyond a simple whitelist). Depending on exactly what you
>> need, you may be able to get the desired functionality using multiple
>> wikis. Also, as it sounds like you're just developing an internal wiki
>> for a small company, how much security do you need? Does it really
>> matter if people are able to read pages they ideally shouldn't be able
>> to?
> 
> There are items, which management, for instance, does not want available 
> to everyone, while in preparation. It is not about things being secret. 
> Rather about things being presented at a given time, in a given shape. A 
> reasonable policy for a proper internal communication.
> 
> On virtually every page of a MediaWiki permissions related module there 
> is a red message that whoever needs per page permissions should look for 
> another system.
> 
> Some modules providing permissions per namespace seem quite OK, however 
> closer look shows that in some cases the namespaced pages escape the 
> protection, i.e. in places like "resently modified pages", etc. My 
> question is - is there an effort under way to close these gaps and an 
> estimation of the work needed?
> 
> Iv.
> 

MediaWiki is primarily developed for sites like those operated by
Wikimedia and Wikia, where either the whole site is viewable, or almost
none of it is. As far as I know, there is no effort, besides any
development work on the various existing extensions, that is working
toward such restrictions. There are some efforts to make the UI code
more separate from the backend code, which could help with this, though
I don't believe that permissions is one of the main reasons for it. To
fully close all the potential gaps would probably require substantial
work, and there's no guarantee that any changes to core code that may be
necessary won't be broken by updates in future versions.

For what you want, it would probably be better and far easier to use 2
separate wikis - like a management wiki for the hidden stuff and another
wiki that has most of the content.

-- 
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)