MediaWiki Tips and Tricks

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extensions

A collection of 25 articles

Implementing a Custom Search Index in MediaWiki with Elasticsearch

Why a Custom Search Index? MediaWiki ships with a simple MySQL‑based search engine that works for tiny wikis, but it quickly becomes a bottleneck as the amount of content grows. Extension:CirrusSearch replaces the native engine with Elasticsearch, giving you full‑text relevance, fast autocomplete, and the ability to

Introduction to Semantic MediaWiki

What is Semantic MediaWiki? Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is a powerful MediaWiki extension that lets you turn a regular wiki into a collaborative knowledge base. By adding simple #set and #ask markup, you can store structured data (properties and values) directly on wiki pages and query that data across the whole

How to Use MediaWiki’s API to Build a Custom Search Widget for Your Website

Introduction MediaWiki powers Wikipedia and thousands of other wikis. Its Action API is a clean, REST‑like interface that lets external sites query a wiki for titles, snippets, images and more. In this guide we walk through the steps needed to turn that API into a lightweight, client‑side search

Managing MediaWiki Pages with Git

Why version‑control a wiki? MediaWiki stores its content in a database, which makes bulk edits, history inspection and offline work cumbersome. By mirroring a wiki with git‑remote‑mediawiki you get a full Git repository of every page, can edit with any editor, and push changes back to the

How to Configure and Use the Translate Extension for Multilingual Content in MediaWiki

Introduction The Translate extension turns a single-language MediaWiki into a fully multilingual publishing platform. It provides in-wiki translation of interface messages, software strings and, most importantly, structured page translation. The extension is bundled together with a handful of supporting extensions in the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB), which gives you

Automating MediaWiki Deployments with Docker Compose and GitHub Actions

Why automate MediaWiki deployments? MediaWiki powers Wikipedia and thousands of other knowledge bases. When you run it in production you usually need a database, a web server, optional extensions and a repeatable way to bring the whole stack up on a new host. Docker Compose gives you a portable, declarative

Top 10 MUST HAVE MediaWiki Extensions for Every MediaWiki

A curated list of ten extensions I believe are indispensable. I explain what problem each solves, when to use it, and any trade-offs to watch out for

How the Moderation Extension Helps You Fight Spam Bots

The Moderation extension is a lightweight anti‑spam tool designed for small and medium MediaWiki sites. By routing every edit and upload from untrusted users into a moderation queue, it stops spam bots before their changes ever appear in the wiki’s history or RecentChanges. Why Moderation beats traditional captchas

How to Use Page Forms Extension to Create Custom Data Entry Forms in MediaWiki

Why Page Forms? The Page Forms extension (formerly Semantic Forms) lets you turn any infobox‑style template into a user‑friendly form. It works on its own, or together with Semantic MediaWiki or Cargo for data storage and querying. With Page Forms you can let editors add, edit and query

How to Secure MediaWiki with SSL and HSTS

Why HTTPS matters for MediaWiki MediaWiki stores user passwords, edit tokens and personal data in clear‑text when it is accessed via HTTP. An attacker on the same network can intercept those values, hijack sessions and even rewrite page content. Enforcing HTTPS encrypts the traffic between the browser and the