After searching for some time on an easy way to protect an internal wiki. I found the following article useful. It goes in-depth into what you would need to change on a base MediaWiki configuration to only allow registered users to see the content within the Wiki. After following all the steps I know am able to login to my private Wiki over SSL! Thus allowing me to keep all my private and important notes online!

If you run MediaWiki software, then you really need to check this plugin out. This paticular plugin allows you to pick specific criteria, the below example shows some of the parameters you can pass:

category=+Africa|Europe
category=Politics and conflicts
ordermethod=category,sortkey
headingmode=ordered

You can setup a list of last modified articles, top articles, newly created article.

For full documentation on what parameters are available you can view the DPL Manual at

The official link on MediaWiki's extension page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList