MediaWiki Tips and Tricks

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A collection of 114 articles

Enhancing MediaWiki with MathJax for Mathematical Content

Why bother with MathJax on a MediaWiki? Ever opened a scientific wiki and found the equations looking like a jumble of back‑slashes and curly braces? It happens more often than you’d think. Readers stumble over raw LaTeX, editors scratch their heads, and the whole page feels half‑finished.

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

Understanding MediaWiki's Revision History and Diff Features

What the revision history really is Ever clicked that tiny “history” link on a wiki page and felt like you were opening a time‑machine? That’s the revision history – a chronological ledger of every edit, from the first shy line of text to the frantic last‑minute fix before

Harnessing Lua Scripting in MediaWiki with the Scribunto Extension

Why Lua feels like a secret weapon for wikis Ever stared at a wikitext page and thought, “there’s gotta be a smarter way”? You’re not alone. In the wild world of MediaWiki, the Scribunto extension quietly hands you a scripting toolbox that looks suspiciously like a Swiss army

Building Custom Skins for MediaWiki: A Developer Guide

Why bother with a custom skin? When you first log into a MediaWiki site the interface looks like the familiar Vector theme. That’s fine for most readers, but developers often want a look that matches a brand, a conference, or just the itch to experiment with HTML/CSS. A

Enhancing Search in MediaWiki Using the CirrusSearch Extension

Why CirrusSearch matters for a MediaWiki site If you’ve ever typed a phrase into Special:Search and gotten a wall of unrelated hits, you know the frustration. The classic MediaWiki search is fast enough for a handful of pages, but it falls flat once your wiki grows beyond a

Mastering MediaWiki Template Development for Dynamic Content

Why “just another template” never cuts it Ever opened a wiki page and felt the layout was as stale as last year’s Christmas sweater? You’re not alone. Most wikis start with a handful of hand‑crafted tables and a sprinkling of {{Infobox}} calls, then they stall. The real

Configuring OAuth Authentication in MediaWiki for Secure Logins

Why OAuth matters for MediaWiki logins When you run a wiki that anyone can join, the old‑school username/password combo starts to feel a bit… rusty. A compromised password can open the whole site to vandalism, and keeping track of password policies across dozens of installs is a headache.

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