Book Image

MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide

By : Mizanur Rahman
Book Image

MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide

By: Mizanur Rahman

Overview of this book

<p>Run your own MediaWiki collaborative website with this fast-paced, friendly tutorial, which is full of information and advice for creating powerful MediaWiki sites, and filling them with varied and useful collaborative content. Whether you are creating a public wiki for completely open contributions, a private wiki for collaborating within your work team or group of friends, or even a wiki for personal use, this book will show you all the essential steps.</p> <p>You will see the various ways of organizing and managing content, and preventing collaboration from getting out of control. You'll learn how to incorporate images and other media into your pages, as well as becoming a wiki markup wizard to produce intricately formatted pages with tables, lists, and more. On the technical side, the book covers how to administer users, back up and restore content safely, migrate your installation to another server or database, and even make hacks to the code.</p> <p>MediaWiki is the free, open-source wiki engine software that powers Wikipedia and many of the other popular wikis across the Web. Written in PHP, it possesses many features that make it the engine of choice for large collaborative wikis: flexible markup, comprehensive user management, multimedia handling, and more.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Free Chapter
1
About MediaWiki

MediaWiki Content Organizing Features


MediaWiki handles these major issues without any problem or complexity whatsoever. The concept and the application of organizing content in MediaWiki are easy to grasp and apply. MediaWiki has the following software features to strengthen its organizing ability.

  • Namespaces

  • Categories

  • Templates

  • Sections

  • Redirection

We will now explore each of the features in detail with examples.

Namespaces

Namespaces are used to group together similar type of contents. Namespaces divide a wiki into different areas so that each functional area is clearly defined. Namespaces can segregate different types of content that may exist under the same title. Generally, namespaces should not be used to categorize content of the same type—we can use categories for that.

The namespaces that come with MediaWiki illustrate this "content type" distinction:

  • The Main, un-prefixed, namespace is for the primary content to be maintained in the wiki.

  • The Talk namespaces are for discussion.

  • The Project...