Academic hub/cs

Academic wikis are third-party wikis meant to be used in an academic context with a greater emphasis on features like access control, content approval, and research analysis.

For other third-party uses of MediaWiki, please see Sysadmin hub.

Knowledge Sharing
Many academic wikis are using Extension:Semantic MediaWiki and leveraging the semantic web to share data. The MediaWiki API can also be used to mine data from other sites; combined with an scheduler program like Cron this can lead to semi-automated data distribution.

Vampire Model
The vampire model consists of two rules:
 * 1) only registered users may edit
 * 2) only registered users may create accounts

This method of account-creation removes the burden of making all accounts from single user/admin, this greatly simplifies matters. Because trust of peers is relatively high in an academic setting, a single account can be made for a P.I., who then can make accounts for their students. Because MediaWiki logs all account activity it is (relatively) easy to track accountability for creation of spam/bot accounts.

Authentication

 * Extension:LDAP Authentication
 * Leverage an existing LDAP (including Microsoft Active Directory, Kerberos) as a single sign-on
 * Alternatives:
 * Extension:Windows NTLM LDAP Auto Auth

Authorization

 * Manual:Preventing_access
 * Manual:Block_and_unblock
 * Extension:EditSubpages
 * Security issues with authorization extensions

Content security

 * Extension:AccessControl
 * Collaboration with commercial entities on academic projects, may require site content security. This extension has been created for this purpose.

Editing

 * Extension:ParserFunctions
 * Bundled with core, required for complex templating including most WP templates.


 * Extension:WikiEditor
 * 2010-era wikitext editor sponsored by Wikimedia.


 * Vector
 * A Polished skin for MediaWiki that comes bundled by default. Enable Extension:Vector for advanced functionality for this skin.


 * Extension:Cite
 * Display citations to show where information originated. This is particularly useful when merging data from a single document on multiple wiki pages to indicate why the information is authoritative.


 * Extension:TableEdit
 * Forms-based editor for wiki-tables.

Navigation & Search

 * Extension:BreadCrumbs2
 * Navigation aid when traversing the wiki, usually used to display and highlight a category hierarchy.


 * Extension:CategoryTree
 * Improve category listings with counters for contained pages of sub-categories.


 * Extension:SphinxSearch
 * An alternative to the default search engine, lightweight but allowing more robust indexing of content through the third-party Sphinx engine.
 * Alternatives:
 * Extension:Lucene-search -- more complicated but more robust still, used by large wikis like Wikipedia


 * Extension:Semantic MediaWiki
 * Allows you to add meta data to content in wiki articles and providing a query language for dynamically retrieving content including properties and lists of articles.
 * Alternatives:
 * Extension:DynamicPageList