MediaWiki Tips and Tricks

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A collection of 125 articles

How to Integrate MediaWiki with Git for Source Control

Why Git Matters for MediaWiki Projects MediaWiki is a living codebase. The core software, skins, and extensions evolve constantly, and most Wikimedia projects host their source on Gerrit or GitLab. Using Git locally gives you three practical benefits: * History on your machine. Every edit, branch, and tag is available offline,

How to Configure MediaWiki for OAuth Authentication with External Providers

Introduction MediaWiki ships with a powerful OAuth extension that can act as an OAuth server, but most sites want to delegate authentication to an existing identity provider – Google, Facebook, GitHub, Keycloak, or a corporate SSO. The OAuth2 Client and the WSOAuth extensions together provide a clean, standards‑compliant way to

Lua Scripting with Scribunto Extension in MediaWiki

Picture this: you’re editing a page, and suddenly a tiny script pops up, churning out tables, calculating dates, or even fetching data from a remote API – all without a single line of PHP in sight. That, dear reader, is the magic of Scribunto.

How to Secure MediaWiki with Two‑Factor Authentication and SSO Integration

Why strengthen MediaWiki login? MediaWiki powers public wikis like Wikipedia and many private knowledge bases. Even a well‑configured password policy is not enough against credential stuffing, phishing or insider threats. Adding a second factor and centralising authentication through Single Sign‑On (SSO) raises the security bar dramatically while keeping

How to use Git for MediaWiki page versioning and collaboration

Why put a wiki under Git? MediaWiki already tracks every edit in its database, but that history lives only on the server. By pulling the wiki into a git repository you get: * offline access to the full page tree. * the ability to create branches, squash commits and cherry‑pick changes.

Mastering MediaWiki Caching: Strategies for High-Traffic Sites

Why “Caching” Is the Lifeblood of a Busy Wiki When a MediaWiki installation starts to see a few thousand page‑views per minute, the server’s CPU and DB threads begin to scream “slow down!”. The first thing most sysadmins learn—sometimes the hard way—is that raw PHP execution

Mastering MediaWiki Templates: Creating Reusable Content Structures

Why Templates Matter in MediaWiki Ever stared at a dozen pages that look almost identical, then spent an afternoon hunting down a stray bold‑tag or a missing reference? You’re not alone. In the wild world of wikis, repetition is a silent productivity killer. A well‑crafted template is

Mastering MediaWiki's Parser Functions: A Developer's Guide

Why parser functions matter

Mastering ParserFunctions in MediaWiki: Logical and String Functions for Dynamic Content

ParserFunctions Unleashed: From Simple Logic to String Sorcery Ever stared at a wiki page that felt as static as a marble statue? Then you probably missed the hidden gears of ParserFunctions humming underneath. Imagine you could ask, “Show this text only if the user is logged in,” or “Trim a

Building Custom Reports in MediaWiki Using Lua Modules

Why Lua modules matter for MediaWiki reporting At first glance a MediaWiki installation looks like a giant collection of wikitext pages, nothing more than a glorified blog. In practice, though, the platform hides a surprisingly powerful scripting layer called Scribunto. With Scribunto you can write Lua code that lives inside