I am creating a Wiki for academic collaboration, but I want to make sure that editing of the wiki is only open to a small group of approved users.
What I wasn't able to determine was if I restrict editing privileges whether I can restrict by section of wiki, or just for the whole site?
On a similar topic, if a user is restricted from editing can they still comment on the discussion pages?
Thanks!
Replying to @K Meyers's post:
I believe that this may depend on the specific wiki software or service you're using. In many (or most?) wikis, you can restrict specific sections or even specific pages. But different wiki tools permit greater or less flexibility in, for instance, whether you can have different restrictions on a sub-page than you do on its parent.
I believe that the management of commenting may similarly vary from wiki to wiki; typically a wiki will provide a hierarchy of privileges and in some cases editing and commenting are treated separately (so a user might be able only to comment, not to edit). In other cases those two sets of privileges might be grouped together (as I believe they are in PBWiki, for instance).
In both cases, the documentation for the specific wiki you're thinking of using should hopefully include answers to these questions.
Although it doesn't address these specific questions, WikiMatrix (http://www.wikimatrix.org/) provides a useful comparison tool that lets you compare features of a number of popular wiki tools (for instance, if you need to find a wiki that will support right-to-left text and WYSIWIG editing).
Replying to @juliaflanders's post:
Katy is using Media Wiki for this project.
Katy, it could be that a MediaWiki ninja will jump in to answer your question, but I wanted to make sure you had seen this "user rights" management help page first:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:User_rights
It looks like some tinkering and testing with sample logins may get you where you need to go! Notice that default permissions are printed at the bottom of the page.
MediaWiki's not really designed to do per-page access restrictions. If you want people to be able to edit the site generally, but not those specific pages, it's probably best to set them as protected, then create a user group that allows editing protected pages.
If you're not absolutely tied to MediaWiki, you might consider using a Content Management System like Drupal. It has node-based access abilities, while still allowing you to track revisions to a page.
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