MediaWiki

I use MediaWiki for a few of my wiki web sites. I also work for the Wikimedia Foundation.^[1] I really like working on MediaWiki code, and contributing to extensions. It's good software (sometimes annoying, but that's hardly unusual in software; at least with open source code, one can help to improve things).

I've experimented with moving to installation from Ubuntu package, but mostly stick to running from a Git clone (including for extensions). I think that it would be wonderful to be able to manage extension retrieval and updating with Composer, but that's not a widely-held view. For some sorts of development, I also run it in Docker (for testing against other PHP versions, or old MediaWiki extensions such as WeRelate).

Extension: MissedPages

Below are all pages relating to the 'MediaWiki' keyword.

2018-04-03 EMWCon videos
2018-10-19 Data modeling
2018-12-29 Blue Bottle
2019-04-24 Cat Whispurr
2019-05-22 Post-hackathon coding
2019-10-06 Generated readme for wmwcli
2019-10-08 A redlink bug in Cargo?
2019-10-24 Exactitude in wiki data modelling
2019-11-14 Copying templates between wikis
2019-12-23 Diagrams service
2020-01-06 Creating a TODO list in MediaWiki with Cargo
2020-01-07 Diagrams extension
2020-01-25 Departing Perth
2020-03-19 Self-contained websites
2020-04-04 Cargo-Lua best practices by River
2020-04-17 More about installing MediaWiki extensions with Composer
2020-06-01 Discourse in MediaWiki
2020-09-05 SVG graphs with the Diagrams service
2022-10-02 Wikispore meeting
2023-05-02 Spaces in rewritten URLs
2023-11-13 Version numbers for MediaWiki extensions
2024-02-09 Invalid magic words
2024-05-01 The speed of editing wikis
2024-05-29 Static sites are better in all but two ways
2024-05-29 QuestyCaptcha not so great
2024-06-29 Avoid format=template
2024-06-30 AuthRemoteUser
2024-07-07 Rewriting feed URLs

Tool: mediawiki-feeds

A tool to get RSS and iCalendar feeds of pages in categories. See https://github.com/samwilson/mediawiki-feeds for more.

Tool: MediaWiki_Backup

A Bash script for backing up a (non-farm) MediaWiki installation. It produces backups, and also dump files suitable for uploading public wikis to the Internet Archive (to match WikiTeam archiving practices). See https://github.com/samwilson/MediaWiki_Backup for more.

Actually, it's often easier to use the following to get the XML dump:

php /var/www/mediawiki/maintenance/dumpBackup.php \
  --full \
  --quiet \
  --wiki wiki_ident \
  --server https://example.org \
  --output=gzip:$BACKUPDIR/wiki-pages.xml.gz

and this to get all images (but excluding any other directories in the images/ directory):

cd /var/www/mediawiki/images
tar zcvhf $BACKUPDIR/wiki-images.tgz ?

Skin: SimpleText

A overly-simple skin for MediaWiki, in use on my personal wikis. See SimpleText MediaWiki skin.

Extension: Genealogy

I maintain the Genealogy extension. It's the simplest thing I could come up with that gets around the redundant links between biographies on a family tree wiki. I'm using it on ArchivesWiki and there's a demo wiki on Toolforge.

Migrating to MediaWiki

Missing or required features:

Bulk category changes (based on category membership, search results, galleries, etc.)
Track 404 errors (and create redirects) ✔️ done at https://misc.samwilson.id.au/2017/404s
Export PDFs of single pages
Create PDF photo albums of category contents
Mass change of template parameters (names or values)
Wiki-to-wiki copy (wwcp)
RSS feeds ✔️ done in #mediawiki-feeds
iCalendar feeds
System to manage geolocation

From Piwigo:

Export all original-resolution files to MediaWiki-compatible names
Export their metadata to wikitext files using the {{photo}} template
Upload all files with mw:Manual:importTextFiles.php

From WordPress:

Export all posts to Markdown with the Jekyll exporter
Use Pandoc to convert to wikitext
Upload all files with mw:Manual:importTextFiles.php

From Flickr:

Special:FlickrImport that will import sets, groups, or lists of photo IDs or URLs.

↑ See also my user page on MediaWiki.org.

[1] See also my user page on MediaWiki.org.

[1]