From: "P.
Hightower" <sgriobhadair(a)gmail.com>
Is it possible to set mediawiki up so that users need to login before
they can access it?
If you're using Apache, and (as you imply) want a login before even
allowing read access, how about using a .htaccess file?
Drawback: they'd have to login twice; once to get through
the .htaccess (which could be a common id/pass for all trusted users),
then a second time to log into the wiki.
Yea, it's a bit of a kludge, but it's pretty much a zero effort
solution.
This is exactly what I do (with one small adjustment) for a site I have.
Everyone shares the authentication password and then they have their own
login before they can edit pages. The small adjustment to the above is
to say you should put the authentication configurations in the main
server configuration instead of in an .htaccess file.