MediaWiki

Introduction

MediaWiki is a popular Wiki software package based on PHP and MySQL and used for the Internet's most high-traffic Wiki, WikiPedia. The project's homepage can be found here.

MediaWiki Setup

Navigation Bar

The nagivation bar at the left side can be edited on the MediaWiki:Sidebar page.

Links

Links to internal wiki pages are specified in double square braces, like:

[[WikiName:PageName]]

Sections

Sections are annotated like:

==Section==

===Subsection===

====Sub-subsection====

Section Linking

You can link to sections on the same page like:

[[#section name|displayed text]]

Or on separate pages like:

[[page name#section name|displayed text]]

Categories

You can add a page to a category by embedding a category identifier in the wiki text of the page, like:

[[Category:Category name]]

On a page, to link to a category, you embed the link like:

[[:Category:Other Category Name]]

Note the colon before "category".

Sub Categories

Adding a category tag to a category page makes the edited category a subcategory of the category specified in the tag.

First create a new category page for the subcategory the same way you would make a regular category. For example, create [[Category:Soccer]]. Then go to the newly created category page and edit it. Add the category tag for the parent category (e.g. [[Category:Sports]]) to the page. In this example, the Soccer category would then be a subcategory of the Sports category. (excerpted from meta.wikimedia.org under the GNU FDL).

Formatting Tags

Source Code and ignoring wiki features

Pre-formatted text can be enclosed in a set of <pre> tags, and will appear in a box, like:

Some prefotmatted text.

If you just want the wiki to ignore some text and print it literally (such as something that would normally be a wiki link) you can enclose it in a set of <nowiki> tags, like: [[Category:Soccer]], which is actually coded like: <nowiki>[[Category:Soccer]]</nowiki>

Wiki Families (multiple wikis on one server)

Multiple URLs, one source directory

Follow the HOWTO on Steve Rumberg's site. Requires Apache (or whatever web server you use) to follow symlinks (I recommend Options SymLinksifOwnerMatch).