For the Love of My Country

Mediawiki is the PHP/MySQL engine that runs wikis such as Wikipedia. I am an admin on a wiki and needed to change user permissions such that registered users would have usual editing rights (talk, main, etc), but that anonymous users would only have permission to edit the talk (discussion) pages. This is so that - while everyone has the ability to contribute, only registered users may contribute to the articles themselves - we wished to set it up this way to avoid abuse of the wiki.

Anyway, was hacking round for ages in LocalSettings.php, trying to change $wgGroupPermissions. Finally figured out that I was attacking this from the wrong angle. The thing is, if you set $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = true;, you automatically overide other restrictions placed on anonymous users (* means all users, including anonymous users). However if you set $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;, all you end up doing is completely removing all rights held by anonymous users.

I found the answer to my problem at the Mediawiki Users Forum, and found it to be pretty darn straight forward after a little bit of playing round with it. Comment here or at the forum if you need further assistance.

Labels: mediawiki, php