Working With MediaWiki

on their own. Still, the threat is there; and beyond that, some administrators simply want to have final control over what gets displayed at all times. Editorial control, in many cases, can be a nice thing to have.
    The natural solution to this problem is one that has its roots in software version control: having one or more versions of a wiki page that are certified as "stable" or approved, and then having the most recent stable version be the one shown by default to users. That way you don’t interfere with the process of wiki-editing, while at the same time ensuring a certain level of security for the content.
FlaggedRevs
    This view of things has reached to Wikipedia, where vandalism has always been a problem. The FlaggedRevsextension (sometimes also referred to as PendingChanges) was developed for that purpose. It was first used on the German-language Wikipedia in 2008, and it is currently used on some other language Wikipedias, though not yet on the English-language one.
    FlaggedRevs can be used on any MediaWiki-based wiki, though it takes some effort to install and use it because it’s a substantial piece of software. It does more than simply enable setting a stable revision of a page: it provides a whole framework for users to review different revisions of a page according to different criteria, so that the decision about which revision(s) to go with can be made by consensus.
    You can read more about FlaggedRevs here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs
Approved Revs
    FlaggedRevs makes sense for Wikipedia, although it may be overkill for small-to-medium-sized wikis, where decisions can just be made by one or a few people without the need for a full, open discussion. In such a case, the Approved Revs extension may be the better solution.
    Approved Revs is an extension that essentially was created to be a much simpler alternative to FlaggedRevs. It basically just lets administrators do one thing: select a single revision of a page as the approved one. When a user goes to a page that has an approved revision, that approved revision is what they will see by default (though they can still see any other revision if they go the "history" page).
    If a page has no approved revision, users will, by default, just see the latest revision — Approved Revs will have no impact. However, the wiki can be set to instead show a blank page if there’s no approved revision — this can be done by adding the following to LocalSettings.php:
$egApprovedRevsBlankIfUnapproved = true;
    If normal users edit a page that already has an approved revision, their changes won’t show up on the default page until another approval happens. But by default, if anyone who has revision-approval permission edits a page, their edit (and thus, the latest revision of the page) will automatically be marked as approved. That usually makes sense, since such editors presumably wouldn’t make changes that they wouldn’t themselves authorize. However, you can change that default behavior by adding the following to LocalSettings.php:
$egApprovedRevsAutomaticApprovals = false;
    Besides protecting content, Approved Revs can also be used to turn MediaWiki into more of a publishing platform, or a traditional CMS, where “draft” versions of a wiki page exist before the page gets “published”. For this case, the $egApprovedRevsBlankIfUnapproved setting becomes quite useful. It’s different from standard publishing schemes because readers can still see all the draft versions, through the history page (although those can be hidden if necessary — see here ), but the basic concept of a page that’s kept hidden until it’s reviewed and approved is there.
    You can also set the group of namespaces for which Approved Revs is applied, via the $egApprovedRevsNamespaces variable. By default it comprises four namespaces: NS_MAIN (the main namespace), NS_HELP (help pages), NS_TEMPLATE (templates) and NS_PROJECT (the project namespace). And you can set Approved Revs to apply to specific individual pages, using the “__APPROVEDREVS__” behavior switch. This is best done via a template.
    As an example, let’s say you only wanted approval to apply to the set of pages in the category “Essays”. You would first turn off Approved Revs in general, by adding the following to LocalSettings.php:
$egApprovedRevsNamespaces = array();
    You would then create an infobox template, to be used for every "essay" page, that defines pages as being in the