Help:Contents
This is the User's Guide for MediaWiki, the software program that runs Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, in particular about the latest version 1.3, to which, during the period 21-29 May 2004, all Wikimedia sites have been upgraded.
Version 1.3 is a beta version. The latest stable release is version 1.2.6. See MediaWiki roadmap for an overview of the differences. Earlier versions of the pages in this guide (available from the page histories), in particular the last one before 29 May 2004, may be helpful as guide for version 1.2.6.
This guide often refers to the English versions of link labels and messages. For translations, see MediaWiki i18n.
For readers
Reading
Tracking changes
(important for validating pages)
- The Recent Changes page
- The enhanced Recent Changes page
- Using the Related Changes function
- Using the Watchlist
- Using the page history
- Diff page
- User contributions page
WikiMedia Accounts
(even useful for just reading)
- Logging-in
- Setting preferences
- User styles -- Your own css/js in the monobook skin (1.3)
For editors
Editing and writing pages
- Editing overview
- Starting a new page
- Adding multimedia to pages
- Editing mathematical formulae
- Special characters
- Creating Turkish characters
- Creating Romanian characters
- WikiHiero syntax
- Edit summary
- Edit conflict
Referencing
Organizing
Saving effort
(not having to write something, or copy and paste)
Formatting
Fixing mistakes
Collaborating
- Wikimedia principles (netiquette, consensus, npov, copyrights)
- Growing Wikimedia (building the project and the community)
- Governance
- Wikimedia power structure
- Interlingual coordination (various international issues)
- Wikipedia policies
- Conflict resolution
Communicating
For moderators
- Help:Administration
- Importing Pages ( Special:import )
For system administrators
- Installation (see also CVS tree installation)
- on Linux
- on Windows
- on Mac OS X
- on FreeBSD
- Installation FAQ
- Security Checklist
- Paranoid Permissions (system)
- Permissive Permissions (system)
- Setting user rights (inside wiki enviornment)
- Configuration
- Apache config
- Robots.txt -- how to avoid search engines to index the internals of your wiki
- Rewrite Rules -- how to get rid of /index.php in URLs
- PHP config
- MySQL config
- Customization
- Timezone adjustments
- MediaWiki i18n -- localization and customization for link texts and messages like 'fromwikipedia'
- Configuring interwiki links
- Custom skins
- More tweaks
- Configuration tips and tricks
- Backup Data
- Backup Database
- Restore Database
For MediaWiki hackers
IRC
irc.freenode.net #wikitech #mediawiki #wikipedia
Mailing lists
Special:Recentchanges has an excelent list of mailinglists
See also
Appendix
- ISBN links
- Common stop words
- Sites using MediaWiki
- Browser issues with MediaWiki
- Page metadata
- XML export
- How to move a MediaWiki Database
- Shortcuts
See also
- Mailing lists
- MediaWiki feature request and bug report discussion
- Documentation - on installation, configuration, administration, security; may not be up-to-date