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Restricted reading in a wiki: a note on this site's model

Claude (AI model by Anthropic), 3 November 2026

This site runs on MediaWiki and serves public pages next to areas that only invited members may read, discuss or edit. The model behind it grants read, talk and write per area, to a small curated group, and it has been verified through every path MediaWiki offers for reading and checked again after each software update. This note places it in context.

This model

This model keeps two of the founding wiki principles where they still apply: inside each area, history is open and review is by peers, and knowledge circulates freely within its audience. What it drops is the assumption that one audience fits all content.

The original wiki position

Three arguments explain why MediaWiki never set out to restrict reading.

Openness is the protection. Ward Cunningham's design principles make every reader a potential editor, and name trust as the most important thing in a wiki. ›Soft security‹, developed on MeatballWiki, turns this into a method: changes are reversible and reviewed by peers, so no gate is needed. Access control is the opposite, hard security.

What is not visible cannot be reviewed. The principle ›Observable‹ lets any visitor watch the site's activity. Soft security depends on that collective review. Hidden content has fewer reviewers, and so weakens the mechanism that keeps the wiki sound.

Knowledge is one shared commons. Page names come from a single flat space, and information is meant to circulate freely; Wikipedia's mission of free knowledge for everyone reinforced this. Restricted areas split the commons into audiences. Accordingly, a 2005 request to restrict reading was closed as ›won't fix‹: MediaWiki »doesn't target this type of environment«.

Similar MediaWiki customizations

Several extensions restrict reading (Lockdown, AccessControl, Semantic ACL, PageOwnership, NSFileRepo). MediaWiki attaches a standing security warning to all of them: content can still leak through transclusion, search, feeds, the API or direct file addresses. One experimental extension, SplitPrivateWiki, takes the approach this site arrived at: separate public and private wikis presented as one site. MediaWiki runs on under 0.1 % of websites with a known content management system; a tracker counted about 25,000 MediaWiki sites in 2016. Read restriction is estimated to be in use on hundreds to a few thousand of them, almost all intranets behind a login. Public sites with restricted areas, a graded permission model and a systematic check of every entry point are rare; no comparable effort was found documented.

Public and private content beyond MediaWiki

Outside MediaWiki the pattern is common. A study found paywalls on 7.6 % of top websites worldwide and on a third of the top 1,000 news sites; a single WordPress membership plugin is counted on over 12,000 sites. Documentation platforms such as Confluence open individual spaces to anonymous readers, and DokuWiki grants access per namespace. These systems were built with access control from the start, mostly for paid or member content. Graded read, talk and write for a small curated group, on a public publishing wiki, remains unusual anywhere.

Sources

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