On Tue Jan 27 2015 at 6:17:35 PM chris tharp <tharpenator(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Chad -- why would Mediawiki be the wrong tool if
someone wanted to exercise
some form of access control? Considering the number of extensions that have
created for different types of access control it seems to be a very popular
desire. Just because someone desires access control doesn't mean that they
don't want the wiki experience elsewhere in their website -- they just
don't want it on every page.
There's lots of extensions. Doesn't mean they're all good ideas ;-) Wikis
are meant to be open and all pages in a namespace should be equal.
When they're not, that's what protection is for.
(Implicitly Mediawiki developers agree with
this philosophy since all Mediawiki Namespace pages on every wiki have
access control).
Sure, per-namespace edit permissions make sense. Because not all
namespaces are equal. NS_MEDIAWIKI can damage the site so it's
restricted by default. I totally could respect an argument for a wiki
protected NS_TEMPLATE or NS_MODULE in the same manner.
Strangely the only type of access control build into
Mediawiki is a top-down centralized type of access control, which is
strange when you think about it. Everyone agrees some type of access
control needs to build into the software, but Mediawiki, out of the
package, only allows a top-down centralized approach. Others just want more
varied types of access control than the off-the-shelf model presented
inside a standard Mediawiki.
Sure, access controls make sense for different actions or namespaces
(see above). I just think per-page ACLs are incompatible with the idea of
a wiki and there are other tools better suited for the job.
-Chad