MediaWiki

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MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki application.

Description

It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation and runs on many websites, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons.

PHP and MySQL

It is written in the PHP programming language and uses a MySQL database.

Features

The software has more than 800 configuration settings and more than 2,000 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed.

On Wikipedia alone, more than 1000 automated and semi-automated bots and other tools have been developed to assist in editing.

Data structure notes

Table: page

Query for pages:

SELECT page_title, page_touched FROM `page` where page_namespace=0 AND page_is_redirect=0 ORDER BY page_title

Use namespace=6 for images ("File:" prefix)

Field: page_namespace

page_namespace values:

  • 0: page
  • 4: About_(nonfiction), About (redirect)
  • 6: image
  • 8: Sidebar, Loginreqtitle, Loginreqpagetext
  • 10: template
  • 10: page "Test" page_id: 2403 ... or Template:Test
  • 14: page

wikitext

See:

History

The first version of the software was deployed to serve the needs of the Wikipedia encyclopedia in 2002.

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects continue to define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki.

The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of hits per second.

Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers.

Other uses

It has also been deployed by some companies as an internal knowledge management system, and some educators have assigned students to use MediaWiki for collaborative group projects.

Upgrading

See:

The logo that appears in the top left of each page is determined by the $wgLogo configuration line in the LocalSettings.php file.

There are two ways to change the logo:

Method one

Upload a picture to your wiki using the normal file uploading interface. This allows the logo to be replaced easily, so you may want to protect the page if you use this method.

Then add the $wgLogo line to LocalSettings.php, for example:

$wgLogo = "{$wgUploadPath}/6/62/mylogo.png";

Method two

Upload an image to your server by other means (such as FTP).

Add the $wgLogo line to LocalSettings.php, for example:

$wgLogo = "{$wgScriptPath}/mylogo.jpg";

(In this example, the image is in the same folder as the LocalSettings.php file.)

If you want to change the logo in only specific pages, override #p-logo css's background-image property or use third party extension like Extension:LogoFunctions.

Caution: Do not simply overwrite the default logo installed with MediaWiki (/skins/common/images/wiki.png); this file will be overwritten when you upgrade.

A good logo size is 135x135px or 150x150px. The maximum logo size in Vector is ~160x160px, while MonoBook's is ~155x155px. A logo that is too large will be cut off.

Source: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ#How_do_I_change_the_logo.3F

See also: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgLogo

On This Day

See MediaWiki On This Day.

WikiApiary

WikiApiary is a resource for people who run MediaWiki websites.

WikiApiary collects, graphs and analyzes information about MediaWiki websites, providing visibility and awareness of activity.

See also

General

Special pages

External links

General

Skins