Mediawiki is the server-side wiki software used by Wikipedia and many other wiki websites. Although installing Mediawiki and editing articles is very easy, there is a learning curve associated with developing and maintaining a wiki. This article aims to breakdown the things I learned in the process of building my first wiki site (Campers Wiki) and includes links to various pages that I found helpful.
INSTALL AND USER GUIDE
To start, here are some links related to the basics (downloading and installing MediaWiki and editing pages):
Download: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki
Install Guide: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki
User Guide: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki
Editor Cheat Sheet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
PRETTY URLS
Setting up pretty URLs is important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization): http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL
CACHING
Set up memcached to speed up mediawiki. Mediawiki will ask for the ip/port of memcached server during the initial install. On Ubuntu I was able to install via apt-get and set it up very painlessly. One downside, is that pages are cached and sometimes will sometimes not show changes immediately. An article’s cache can be purged by adding ?action=purge to the article’s URL.
EXTENSIONS
Mediawiki’s base functionality is limited in certain areas… Extensions can be added to improve it. The spam and template sections will involve setting up extensions.
SPAM
By default mediawiki is set up such that anonymous visitors can make changes. This makes it easy for anyone to make changes on the site, but leaves the site more open to spam… Thus, the 5 steps described in this article should be followed: Holy Grail for Blocking Spam in MediaWiki
TEMPLATES
Mediawiki articles can use templates to make life easier for editors and give articles consistency.
Here’s an example… This is the wikipedia article regarding PHP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
If you click on the edit this page tab at the top of that page, you’ll see the source code for that article. At the top is a section that looks like this:
{{infobox programming language
| name = PHP
| logo = [[Image:PHP logo.svg|180px|PHP]]
| designer = [[Rasmus Lerdorf]]
…..
}}
That is passing various parameters to the “infobox programming language” template. This creates the nice looking box on the right side of that article. That template can be edited by going to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
Note: underscores and spaces are interchangeable in mediawiki URLs
That template (along with most other templates) uses if-statements to make the look cleaner when not all parameters are passed. These if-statements and other similar functions are only available if you install the Parser Functions Extension:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki
More Information on Templates: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki
That information assumes the parser functions extension is installed
CHANGING THE DEFAULT SKIN
http://www.siteground.com
CATEGORIES
All articles inside a wiki should be associated with one or more categories. This ensures that there are no orphan pages and makes it easy to find other articles associated with a particular article. It also ensures that search engines can properly index your wiki site. It is important that all wiki pages are categorized.
Info Regarding Categories: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki
Dave