User:Raidarr/Restrict editing to authorized users

This is a guide to restrict changing a wiki to only the groups that need to edit. There are several ways to do this, but this assumes you want to restrict page editing to 'confirmed' users and yourself.

Through permissions

This assumes the wiki has public visibility, ie, you did not create it as private.

• Go to Special:ManageWiki/permissions on your wiki.
• Begin with the (everyone) group.
• Remove the following rights: createpage, createtalk, and edit.
• Enter a reason and hit Save.
• Go to the Users group and remove changetags, createpage, createtalk, edit, editcontentmodel, move,and upload. Enter reason, hit save.
• Go to the Confirmed users, the group you'd be giving to people who edit the wiki.
• Add changetags, createpage, createtalk, edit, editcontentmodel, move,and upload to the permissions through the unassigned permissions tab. Reason, save.
• This should result in a wiki where nobody can meaningfully affect it without being confirmed. You can do this through Special:UserRights. You can add these rights to the administrator group as well to ensure you aren't disrupted, or add yourself to the confirmed users group.

This is not a perfect solution and I am looking into ways to either explain this better or achieve the goal more elegantly. This method attempts to strike a balance where you don't need to know too much about how things work while getting the job done cleanly. If it doesn't work out, you can use these steps in reverse to make the wiki work 'by default' before doing something different.

Things not to do

• Deleting groups: Only delete groups when you fully understand how MediaWiki permissions work. Certainly do not try to delete the Users or Everyone groups, and do not remove the bureaucrat group because it's "not needed" - it is needed, because it gives you the managewiki permission to make changes like this. If you want to mess with it, ensure that managewiki is in another group that you have on you.
• Simply remove all rights from everyone/users and create a new group: It's ideal to use groups that already exist because they've been baked into the software. Removing all permissions can have unintended side effects and the more you remove from the everyone/users group, the more that must exist for an editing group. That is why the 'through permissions' header has you remove specific permissions and not just everything.

Through namespaces

This is more work than the permissions method, which is why I haven't filled this out yet.