Comments on: MediaWiki and Access Control

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Jeremy – thanks for the idea! I suppose there’s no real need to shoehorn all wiki-like activities into one central place… Not sure how Tiddly would work out, though – don’t users have to manually save/upload the file each time? How would it handle collaboration with multiple authors?

By: J$

J$ — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

We have had similar requests concerning our wiki (http://wiki.case.edu). My idea is to use another tool for the job — per request installations of TiddlyWikis generated on demand. We stick them behind CAS and let the user define the set of other users which would be allowed to access the wiki.

Per Jeff’s idea, such an idea could be extended to use Shibb instead of CAS to allow collaboration between people from multiple Universities.

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Hm… a fork of MediaWiki to support security and access control… That’s definitely an option – it is open source. I’m not familiar enough with the inner workings – would it be possible to implement this as a set of extensions so that forking could be avoided?

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

An interesting idea Aron. My particular interest is integrating Mediawiki with other protected/restricted/whatever applications. It might be neat to build CAS or Shib support into Mediawiki…

By: Aron

Aron — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

MediaWiki could really benefit from a project fork, I think. It’s true that mediawiki is developed for wikimedia internal use primarily, but it is still open source. I guess nobody has been motivated enough to start a new branch.

By: Earl Fogel

Earl Fogel — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

We use MediaWiki at the University of Saskatchewan (http://wiki.usask.ca), but we don’t have one big wiki for everyone. Instead, we create separate wikis for each group who wants one. When you ask for a wiki, you can choose to keep it completely private to your group, or make it publicly readable, or completely open so the public can read and write.

We’re still in the early stages of all this, but interestingly, so far no-one has asked for a public wiki.

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Earl, thanks for the suggestion.

I’ll check out how easy it is to replicate Mediawiki sites – ideally I could set up a “template” site with some help content and backup admin account, and just clone that as needed. I do that for Drupal sites now, but that pattern in Mediawiki would be handy. It does look like Mediawiki would require a completely separate installation for each site, which would be a bit of a pain – not fatal though.

By: Vidyut Luther

Vidyut Luther — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

hey guys,
Just googling around.. has anyone had any luck with getting Mediawiki integrated with Shibb or Mod_shib ?

By: dnorman

dnorman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

haven’t tried that. we’re not using shib up here yet.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

I was able to get this extension to work on MediaWiki 1.9 when all others failed. So I want to thank you for your hard work.

I have one question. When I use this extension, on the page I want to protect, where the accesscontrol info is located displays a 1 on the page. How can I change that? Maybe it could display the user that have access to the page instead of a 1?

Thanks in advanced.

Anthony