Help:Contents

MozillaWiki Handbook
Software help for MozillaWiki — see page histories for older versions.
Handbook Contents | Other help

MediaWiki is an open source Wiki engine licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is used by many websites, including this one. On these help pages, you will find both a user and an administrator guide for using MediaWiki.

Introduction

1. Documentation: Introduction

For readers

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Navigating

1. Searching, Go button
2. What links here
3. Random page
4. Special pages
5. Printable version

Tracking changes

1. Recent changes
2. Enhanced recent changes
3. Related changes
4. Watching pages
5. Page history
6. Diff
7. User contributions

Accounts

1. Logging in
2. Preferences
3. User style

For editors

Editing overview

Starting a new page

1. Page name

Images and other uploaded files

1. Image description page

Special characters

1. Turkish characters
2. Romanian characters
3. WikiHiero syntax — warning: lots of images! (for Egyptian hieroglyphs)

Formatting

1. Formula
2. Table
3. EasyTimeline syntax

Referencing

1. Link
2. Piped link
3. Interwiki linking
4. Variable
5. URL

Organizing

1. Sections
2. Templates
3. Category
4. Redirect
5. Renaming (moving) a page
6. Namespace

Saving effort (not having to write something, or copy and paste)

1. Automatic conversion of wikitext
2. Editing toolbar

HTML in wikitext

Fixing mistakes and vandalism

1. Reverting a page to an earlier version

Communicating

1. Edit summary
2. Talk page
3. Edit conflict
4. Minor edit

Testing

For moderators

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Help:Administration

Documentation: Administrator's Guide

Help:Mediawiki CSS

For system administrators

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Overview

1. Administrator's Guide
2. MediaWiki Architecture
   1. Display Layout
3. Database Architecture
   1. Design Format

Installation

1. Installation - Long
2. Installation
   1. on Linux
   2. on Windows
   3. on Mac OS X
   4. on FreeBSD
3. CVS tree installation)
4. Installation FAQ
5. Timezone adjustments

Security

1. Security
2. Security Checklist
3. Paranoid Permissions (system)
4. Permissive Permissions (system)
5. Setting user rights (inside wiki environment)

Configuration

1. Configuration
2. Help:Configuration
3. Apache config
4. Robots.txt -- how to avoid search engines to index the internals of your wiki
5. Rewrite Rules -- how to get rid of /index.php in URLs
6. PHP config
7. MySQL config

Customization

1. Customization
2. Timezone adjustments
3. MediaWiki localization -- localization and customization for link texts and messages like 'fromwikipedia'
4. Interwiki links
5. Custom skins
6. Custom Namespaces
7. More tweaks
8. Configuration tips and tricks

Manage the database

1. Backup Database
2. Restore Database
3. Reduce the size of the database

Performance

1. PHP caching and optimization
2. File cache
3. Cache strategy deployed by Wikimedia
4. Wikimedia servers: an example of a multi-server configuration

Upgrading

1. Upgrade Mediawiki

For MediaWiki hackers

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MediaWiki Development

Documentation: Developer's Guide

How to become a MediaWiki hacker

Write your own MediaWiki extension

Database layout

http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/mwdoc/ (Source code documentation)

Notes from the trenches (MediaWiki development from C coder's POV)

Appendix

1. Help:ISBN links
2. Common stop words
3. Sites using MediaWiki
4. Browser issues with MediaWiki
5. Page metadata
6. XML export
7. How to move a MediaWiki Database
8. Shortcuts

Contact

1. irc.freenode.net #mediawiki #wikipedia
2. Mailing lists
3. MediaWiki feature request and bug report discussion

See also

• Documentation - on installation, configuration, administration, security; may not be up-to-date
• w:Wikipedia:Glossary
• Check the privacy policy, if any, of the site you use; for Wikimedia: draft privacy policy