Document expiry and access restriction in MediaWiki

Question

My team is considering setting up a MediaWiki wiki to share knowledge and manage information within the team.

Two features the team have expressed an interest in having as part of any new system are:

• Access restriction for certain pages/items. Occasionally there may be a need to restrict some members of the team from viewing specific pages, perhaps relating to performance management or interview schedules/results. Does MediaWiki cater for this? I know you can lock pages to make them uneditable, but I'm not so sure you can hide them from being viewed altogether?

• Document Expiry. It would be great to have an alert telling you that a page has been untouched for say, 12 months, and as a result may be out of date - flagging it for review or deletion to keep wiki content current. Does MediaWiki have this ability, or is there an extension that enables it?

Cheers for any help you can provide.

Dave.

Answer 1

You do have some access restrictions as outlined in Manual:User_rights, there are also various extensions you can add that may give you more flexibility in this regard.. As far as your Document expiry concern goes, it is possible to create a bot that will patrol your wiki and anything that has not been updated in a set amount of time can have a template pre-pended to it. There are also several bots out there that I am aware of such as MiszaBot (I-III) on Wikipedia that will take any post over a certain age and archive it for you. I hope this helps you figure out if this is the way for you to go.