I recently tried to set up the following under LocalSettings.php in the hopes of hiding the mediawiki namespace to only trusted user-groups for viewing & editing. Unfortunately, while editing is restricted by editinterface; viewing (read) is not affected by the below. This is under the latest software release of 1.29.1 on a private wiki.

$wgNamespacePermissionLockdown[NS_MEDIAWIKI]['*'] = array('staff');
$wgNamespacePermissionLockdown[NS_MEDIAWIKI]['read'] = array('staff');
$wgNamespacePermissionLockdown[NS_MEDIAWIKI]['edit'] = array('staff');

I would appreciate any assistance to resolving this. I did read the linked task T148582, but that only seems to impact API.

RESOLVED: oops, forgot to place after the extension require_once statement.