Two-staged approval process for wiki articles

Question

I'm trying to configure a wiki to allow a two staged approval process. The basic work flow requires something like:

1. A group of users submits a short form
2. After admin approval, a larger form becomes available to the group
3. The group submits the larger form
4. After admin approval, the page (filled by the form) becomes public

I've been looking at TikiWiki and MediaWiki for a while trying to configure each to get even close to this model, but I'm having some problems.

With TikiWiki, it seems like the approval stage should be a transition, either changing the group permissions to allow access to a new tracker or changing the form category to close one form and open the other, but I haven't been able to nail down the permissions for that configuration.

With MediaWiki, the main problem seems to be that the back-end was not made to have complex permissions. I've been using SMWHalo along with SemanticForms to construct this, but I can't find anything like Tikiwiki's transitions for changing the permissions for either the group or the form automatically.

I'm a bit new to Wiki development and I know that there are a lot of options for wiki frameworks, so I'm asking for suggestions for a good work flow for this product. My goal is to only start actually touching the framework code to make the final adjustments and not to start off modifying an already well developed code base.

Answer 1

You should really ask yourself why you want this and why you want this in a wiki.

A Wiki's main advantage is being quick and easy and thus encouraging to the user. Adding approval stages will discourage users to participate. The hardest part in any wiki is not preventing vandalism or false information. The hardest part is to encourage participation.

If you really need a difficult approval workflow you might want to look at CMS systems. AFAIK typo3 has something like this built in.

If really you want to go with a wiki and an approval process, for DokuWiki you could have a look a the publish plugin: http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:publish