Patrick Kenel wrote: > Good summary, Ilario. My question: Why is it difficult with Mediawiki?
Because Mediawiki was developed for open-access projects such as Wikipedia, which does require only very little control access for reading (e.g. deletion, oversight). Several extensions have been created to control access, but since the core software has not been designed with this kind of security in mind, and there are many potential ways to get information out of the system, so it is very hard to guarantee that they work as intended. This is, as far as I know, the "official" position of the developers. It does not say anything about whether these extensions would work well enough in practice, nor if they would fit any of our needs. You can have a look at the following pages for more information: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Restricting_access http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_issues_with_authorization_extensions For what it's worth, we use Mediawiki at work and decided to create different closed wikis for each project. We first tried to use another wiki system that is better at restricting access, but people were confused by the different syntaxes (either because they contribute to Wikipedia, or because they collaborate with other people who use Mediawiki), so we switched to Mediawiki. We have ~10 active wikis and it works ok, but it could easily become a nightmare if people start having to share information from one project to another... Frédéric _______________________________________________ http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website Wikimediach-l mailing list https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l
