Mediawiki

Draft

Definition

MediaWiki is a free software wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis, including this website.

We use MediaWikis in several other projects, including writing-to-learn wikis in high schools. Since MediaWikis are complex systems and somewhat difficult to use, you may consider another wiki technology for populations that are technically a bit challenged (most people, including the so-called digital natives). Consider using a Mediawiki in education, if you (a) plan to create a real hypertext and (b) have your students work on it for many many hours (not just 2-3 lessons).

Extensions

Must-have mediawiki extensions for educational wikis

Here is a list of useful extensions that may want to install according to your needs (basically a sub-set of extensions we use for edutechwiki)

Crucial extensions

• Collection - An extension for creating wiki books. See Help:Books for this wiki.

• Wikilog - A blogging modules. As of June 2009 this is still in Beta, but it does work. E.g. see the transcluded blog entries, i.e. the News in our main page or the Wikilog central page, or [[Blog:DKS|the blog of Daniel K. Schneider]]

• SyntaxHighlight to display various kinds of computer code. A must have for technical wikis, also useful to get better rendering for the Collection extension.

• PageBy. An extension that inserts authors on top of the page if you add a tag. Useful if you believe that writing should be attributed. This actually should not be an extension tag, but a standard Mediawiki option to be configured.

• DiscussionThreading. Transform the discussion pages into threaded forums (else you quickly will get a mess. Useful if you plan to have students comment and ask questions.

• EditWarning shows a warning message if the user edits a page that is being edited by other users at the same time.

• FCKeditor enables a more intuitive WYSIWYG editor when editing pages on a MediaWiki-based site. This extension can create bad wiki code and doesn't work with all outdated browser versions. Therefore, I didn't install it yet in this wiki since I really care about having clean code and pages. But we do use in the version and other wikis for which I care less. I expect a better version for MW 1.6 (fall 2009). - Daniel K. Schneider 16:38, 2 July 2009 (UTC).

Helper extensions

• ParserFunctions (needed by some other extensions)

Others

There exist dozens of more or less useful and well working extensions and hundreds in total. Look at our Version page to see what we currently use or wade your way through MediaWiki.org, where most extensions are listed and categorized.

Links

General

• MediaWiki.org. Official Home Page
• Sites using MediaWiki

Other edutechwiki pages

• Mediawiki SvGViz extension, an extension that graphically shows links in a page. Developped by Romain Sauvain and Urs Richle for EduTech wiki for MediaWiki 1.10 and more recent versions (still runs in MW 1.15).
• Mediawiki collection extension installation. Our own installation notes.