[Mediawiki-l] Partitioning a mediawiki installation

[Filippo A. Salustri]

Hi,
I really like mediawiki, but there's one thing I cannot do easily, it seems,
so I'm looking for advice.
I need to be able to partition the collection of pages into areas that are
private and semi-private and public.
I know there are a variety of access control extensions, but they all seem
rather complex compared to how, say, foswiki, handles it.
I know about namespaces, and categories, and subpages, but they all seem
like so much more work than just setting up "webs" in foswiki.
I need to provide "private" areas where only individuals can get access; I
also need to separate content into a few large collections that won't
overlap by default.
No matter whether I consider namespaces, or categories, or subpages, there's
always a lot of extra work needed to ensure new pages are properly named or
categorized.  The names of the pages themselves seem to get longer than I
want, because of specifying namespace or parent-page names; or I have to
ensure my user community always puts in the right categories, which is a
burden on them.
There are serious advantages to using mediawiki, but this partitioning thing
is a dealbreaker.  And many of the extensions seem to require more
hand-holding than I really want to provide.

So, given this, does anyone have any advice for me?

Cheers.
Fil Salustri

-- 
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON
M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: salustri at ryerson.ca
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/