How to create a whitepage everyone can see before login in MediaWiki?

Question

I have a MediaWiki wiki within an very loose non-profit organization. Members and volunteers can work together. The wiki is meant to build internal knowledge together. So anonymous (*) can not read or write. After users login they can read all and write most data. The volunteer must make a request to the organization to create an account for them.

But the user is awaiting, they first will get an idea what the wiki is about. But they see only a login page, which does not give any idea of the content of the wiki. So they do not even do a request for an account.

So I want to create a kind whitepage, an introduction page, the first page, which everybody can read. And on the bottom of that the login form.

I tried:

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Rights
• Only the main page is public accessible, the other pages are not
• Search for: 'whitepage mediawiki'
• Search for the current Login page. I might alter that page with some informational text above. But I could not find that page. My MediaWiki namespace does not contain pages.

How can I create an informative whitepage, before users have to log in?

Answer 1

You may need to look at this configuration parameter to specify specific pages that will be visible to non-logged-in users :

$wgWhitelistRead

$wgWhitelistRead = [
    'Main Page',
    'MediaWiki:Common.css',
    'MediaWiki:Common.js'
    ];

FYI, reading this page, I discovered that there is also a similar parameter taking regex as an input :

$wgWhitelistReadRegexp