MediaWiki Tips and Tricks

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A collection of 121 articles

Advanced Search with CirrusSearch Extension in MediaWiki

What is CirrusSearch? If you’ve ever tried to hunt for a specific phrase on a wiki with a gazillion pages, you know the built‑in search can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. CirrusSearch changes that story. It hooks MediaWiki up to Elasticsearch (soon OpenSearch) and

How to Protect MediaWiki Against Brute-Force Logins with Fail2Ban

Why Brute‑Force Protection Matters for MediaWiki MediaWiki powers thousands of public wikis, from community projects to corporate knowledge bases. A public login form is an obvious target for credential‑spraying and dictionary attacks. Even if you enforce strong passwords, an attacker can still lock out legitimate users or overload

Automating MediaWiki Maintenance Tasks with Cron Jobs and Scripts

Why automate MediaWiki upkeep? Running a wiki is like keeping a garden alive – you water the plants, pull the weeds, and occasionally trim the hedges. If you wait for a weekend binge‑watch session to pop up on the calendar and then scramble to run updateSpecialPages.php or a rebuildData.

Improving MediaWiki Performance Through Advanced Cache Strategies

Why “just another tweak” never cuts it for MediaWiki Ever opened a wiki page and felt the load bar crawl like a snail on a rainy day? You’re not alone. The thing about MediaWiki is that it stacks layers of caching like a lasagna – if one layer is soggy,

Mastering MediaWiki API for Custom Applications

Why the MediaWiki API Matters for Your Project Ever stared at a wiki page and thought, “There’s got to be a better way to pull this data into my own app?” You’re not alone. The MediaWiki Action API is the hidden doorway that lets you treat a wiki

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.