MediaWiki Tips and Tricks

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A collection of 140 articles

Mastering MediaWiki Templates for Dynamic Content Creation

Why Templates Matter in MediaWiki When you first dive into a MediaWiki installation it’s easy to think that every page has to be typed out from scratch. In practice that quickly turns into a nightmare of copy‑paste, broken links, and inconsistent styling. Templates are the answer – reusable snippets

Mastering MediaWiki API for Automated Content Management

Picture this: you’ve just finished a massive data dump from a legacy system, and you need to push thousands of rows into a wiki

Leveraging MediaWiki's Parser Functions for Advanced Templating

Why parser functions matter in modern MediaWiki templating When you first encounter MediaWiki’s templating it feels a bit like opening a toolbox where most of the tools are hidden behind curly braces. You can get a simple infobox up and running with a handful of parameters, but as soon

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