MediaWiki/Presentation: Difference between revisions

Cue POTY slideshow and play in loop 30 minutes prior to presentation

There is video, but so far I haven't been able to slice it and keep the audio track intact.

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These screenshots of [[:Category:MediaWiki Sites|sites running MediaWiki]] illustrate the breadth of usage in the software world, and also some compelling theming examples.

== What's a Wiki? ==

[[Image:Thomas Jefferson rev.jpg|thumb|right|He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.]]

The growth curve of MediaWiki is exponential.  The quality of the software is excellent.

Does your wiki have [http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page conferences]?

WikiPedia now has over ten million articles across 250 languages!

; WYSIWYG editor :Weird Yucky Sucky Interference With Your Goodness

==== WikEd ====

==== FCK Editor ====

In 2007 it was announced that a WYSIWYG editor would be built for MediaWiki.  Wikia (Jimmy Wales' for-profit venture) started work on it.  It still isn't ready for prime time.  Note that I had to patch a minor bug to get it to work and even then, it did funny things with my article (wanted to collapse a line-break between template tag and next line resulting in a space being inserted prior to the next line, resulting in preformatted text rendering for that line.

Other points about using MediaWiki

* Style sheets and

</dl>

# Subpages

## <pre><noinclude> </noinclude> <includeonly></includeonly></pre> [[Template:Messagebox]] example.

## arguments

## Templates used on this page

# Categories

# Navigation (talk about in Administration)

== Administering it ==

| type = restricted

| text = You can remove the database configuration lines into it's own file and then include that file from LocalSettings so that you now can commit LocalSettings to your version control repository without revealing the db credentials.}}

## Database settings

## moved to a separate file so that we can track changes to the general config in version control, without checking in our db credentials

require_once( "$IP/DatabaseSettings.php" );

One good practice is to have some sort of text version or other backup of your wiki in case the machine, webserver, or database that the system depends on is down.  As an administrator, you can use the dumpBackup.php script found in the <code>maintenance</code> directory of you MediaWiki installation.  Something like the following in a system [[cron]] would be good:

/usr/bin/php /var/www/phase3/maintenance/dumpBackup.php --current --output=file:/var/backups/example.com/`date +%F`-wiki.text.export.txt

As a user, one tool that can come in handy is [[Special:Wiki2XML]] <ref>http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/README, see also [[Format_conversion]]</ref>

Another useful tool to the Administrator is the bulk image importer.  To import all the screenshots that I used at the start of this presentation, I did the following:

php importImages.php --user=Freephile --comment='Set of screenshots of sites using MediaWiki ' ~/Desktop/mediawiki/snaps/

Note how using a Category tag in the comment will automatically place the images in the Category specified.

=== Extensions ===

So many examples, which ones to highlight?

==== Timelines  ====

# http://www.ehartwell.com/InfoDabble/MediaWiki_extension:_Timeline

MIT's SIMILE project Timeline is integrated into Semantic MediaWiki

== Getting it, Installing it ==

{| class="datatable"

| bgcolor="#FF1000" | September 2008

|}

=== Integration with Software Development ===

=== Setup for an intranet and/or KB ===

* http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:UploadForm.js/Documentation

* http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Redesigning_the_upload_form

== Resources ==