Manual:FAQ

Where do I download MediaWiki?
Click here to download the latest stable release of MediaWiki. Files are supplied in a .tar.gz archive. MediaWiki can also be obtained direct from our Subversion repository.

How do I install MediaWiki?
Installing MediaWiki takes between 10 and 30 minutes, and involves uploading/copying files, and running the installer script to configure the software - see Installation or the complete Installation Guide.

Full instructions can be found in the INSTALL file supplied in the distribution archive.

How do I install MediaWiki using a package?

 * See also Software bundles

Many Linux distributions provide MediaWiki in a packaged format for that distribution. The MediaWiki development team refers you to your Linux distribution for assistance with installing, configuring or using them. The individual communities & companies who maintain such packages should provide installation instructions.

Be warned that third-party distributions may be older versions, so pay close attention to compatibility information for directions and extensions.

Can I install more than one wiki on a server using MediaWiki?
It is possible to install more than one wiki on a server provided that:

OR
 * You use a different database for each wiki
 * You use a different database prefix for each wiki (for Postgres, you can achieve a similar effect by using different schemas and users)

For information on these options, see $wgDBname and $wgDBprefix respectively.

For information on setting up a wiki family, see Manual:Wiki family.

For information on an alternative way of setting up more than one wiki using the same server, database and source, see Steve Rumberg's (archived version) excellent expose and additional comments from users.

Does MediaWiki work with safe_mode enabled?
Yes, but only to a limited degree. See Safe mode.

Does MediaWiki require shell access?
Shell access (SSH access) is not required for installing MediaWiki, but it is highly recommended. Without shell access, it may even be difficult for you to get a backup of your wiki, or to upgrade to a new version. Some maintenance tasks will not be possible at all without shell access.

How do I install extensions?
See Manual:Extensions for information about installing extensions, as well as writing them. See the Extension Matrix and the Category:Extensions to find existing extensions.

How do I add extra namespaces?
To add a namespace, modify your LocalSettings.php file, and add namespaces via $wgExtraNamespaces. You can add the following code to add a "Portal" namespace, and its corresponding discussion namespace:

Be sure to add underscores instead of spaces, such as in Portal_talk. Otherwise, the namespace will not be declared properly!

How do I enable uploading?
File uploads are an often-used feature of MediaWiki, but are disabled by default in all current release versions. To enable them, first make the upload directory (default images) writable by the web server (chmod 777 or allow the Apache user to write to it, etc.) then set $wgEnableUploads to true in LocalSettings.php (i.e. "$wgEnableUploads = true;"). See Manual:Configuring file uploads for more information.

How do I enable embedded math formulas?
MediaWiki allows embedded math formulas via a helper program called texvc that uses LaTeX to render the formulas. See Manual:Math for setup instructions.

How do I purge a cached page?
To purge a cached page, such as when making changes to the navigation bar, add  to the end of the page's dynamic URL.

e.g. http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=purge

or  to the end of the page's short form URL:

e.g. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Main_Page?action=purge

See also: Manual:Purge, Manual:Parameters to index.php

How do I allow uploading of additional formats?
MediaWiki requires that allowed file upload formats are specified using the $wgFileExtensions configuration directive. Usually this directive is situated in LocalSettings.php in the root of your MediaWiki installation.

For example, to extend uploading to PDF files, add the following to LocalSettings.php:

To extend uploading to more than one type of file, use the following syntax

See Manual:Configuring file uploads for more information.

"File is corrupt or has an invalid extension"
Some users have reported that after adding a file format to the allowed extensions list, an error is encountered. The text of the error is similar to the following:


 * The file is corrupt or has an incorrect extension. Please check the file and upload again.

Possible solutions:


 * Set the value of $wgMimeDetectorCommand, e.g. under Unix or Linux, this would be
 * $wgMimeDetectorCommand = "file --brief --mime";
 * Compile/install the fileinfo PHP extension
 * Fedora - yum install php-pecl-Fileinfo

See Manual:Mime type detection for more information.

Initial user was not created by installer
Sometimes, the installer fails to create the default user, or the user table is lost for some reason. There are a couple of options for solving this:

maintenance/createAndPromote.php

 * Make sure AdminSettings.php is set up (see AdminSettings.sample)
 * Execute maintenance/createAndPromote.php from the shell

This will create a new user and promote them to an administrator. For help, run the script with the parameter --help</tt>.

Alter the database
above should be replaced with the appropriate user ID which you can see on the user's preference page
 * Register a new account using the regular method (Special:UserLogin).
 * Check the user ID in Special:Preferences.
 * Execute the following SQL statement against the database:

How do I reset a password?
You can use the maintenance/changePassword.php</tt> maintenance script to reset a user's password.

You have to run the script from the command line. In other words, log into the server where your wiki is installed, then open a command prompt. Go to the installation directory, then go to the maintenance subdirectory. Run the following command:

php changePassword.php --user=someuser --password=somepass

Where obviously "somepass" is changed to the password you want to set and "someuser" is changed to the user name as it is listed in the table "user".

You can also use the old way, by modifying the database directly. Assuming that $wgPasswordSalt is set to true (the default), you can use the following SQL query for MySQL:

Where obviously "somepass" is changed to the password you want to set and "someuser" is changed to the user name as it is listed in the table "user".

The user_id</tt> in the CONCAT string is a column name and is not meant to be replaced with 'someuser'

If you obtain a 'dbname.user table does not exist' error, please check the LocalSettings.php file, and double-check the value for the $wgDBprefix variable. If that variable is not empty, try repeating the command, replacing $wgDBPrefix_user</tt> instead of user</tt> in the UPDATE</tt> clause of the SQL statement.

If using Postgres, use this query instead:

You can also try the Password Reset extension.

DB expert answer
If the external wiki you are interested in is Wikipedia, and you wish to use the prefix "wp" to link to it (the prefix "wikipedia" is the default interwiki prefix for Wikipedia, see Help:Interwiki linking for other defaults), run this SQL statement to modify the interwiki table in your database: The $1 indicates the article name on the external wiki.

Typical user answer
In a graphical SQL program (i.e. PhpMyAdmin), go to the interwiki table. Choose the option to insert (a row). In the iw_prefix field, enter your desired interwiki prefix. In the iw_url field, enter the Base URL of the external wiki plus the text "$1" as mentioned in the DB Expert Answer above. iw_local and iw_trans have default values of zero (0). You may leave them as zero.

For more information, see Help:Interwiki linking

Easy answer
Install the Special:Interwiki extension. You can then add and remove interwiki entries through the Special:Interwiki special page.

How do I make my base URLs shorter? (i.e. /wiki/Article_Name as opposed to /w/index.php?title=Article_Name)
See Manual:Short URL.

Is downloading and using all of MediaWiki.org free?
Yes, it is free in the sense of Free software. See Project:Copyrights for licensing issues regarding the written content of this site.

How do I administrate/manage user rights?
<span id="How_do_I_administrate.2Fmanage_my_users.3F"> See Manual:User rights and Manual:User rights management for general information. See Manual:Preventing access for methods and strategies for restricting access.

How do I stop anonymous users from editing any page?
See Manual:Preventing access for more information.
 * Set $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false; at bottom of LocalSettings.php.

How do I stop anonymous users from reading any page?
See also Manual:$wgWhitelistRead. See Manual:Preventing access for more information.
 * Set $wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = false; at bottom of LocalSettings.php.

How do I restrict account creation?
See Manual:Preventing access for more information.
 * Set $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false; at bottom of LocalSettings.php.

How to add an image to the printable version?
The skin can do this. Just add the image with a special class to the &lt;mySkin&gt;.php file and define the class in the css with display: none for screen

How can I make Mediawiki run faster?
See: Manual:Performance tuning

Upgrading
Generic instructions on the upgrade process can be found in the UPGRADE</tt> file supplied with the software. See also Manual:Upgrading.

How hard is it to upgrade?
If the only file you have modified is LocalSettings.php, and you are upgrading from 1.5 or later, the process is very simple. The amount of human work involved is only a few minutes. The database schema changes will take an amount of time proportional to the size of your database -- potentially hours for wikis with millions of pages, but for a more typical size of a few thousand pages, it is usually done in seconds.

Minor upgrades, within the same major version, say from 1.13.0 to 1.13.1, do not require any schema changes at all. You can just update the files.

Upgrading from 1.4 or earlier is potentially complicated because support for character sets other than UTF-8 was dropped, and the schema for storing bulk text changed. Please read the relevant section in the UPGRADE</tt> file.

Upgrading becomes difficult if you have modified our source code, and you don't want your changes to be overwritten. Tools such as diff and patch may be useful. There is also potential for trouble if you are using unmaintained extensions. Upgrade your extensions at the same time as you upgrade MediaWiki.

How do I upgrade from a really old version? In one step, or in several steps?
In one step, from your old version to the latest stable version. The vast majority of reports, as well as automated testing, indicate that doing it in one step works just fine.

If you have trouble believing this, read this mailing list post.

Should I back up first?
Short answer: yes.

Long answer: it depends on a) how much you value your data, b) how hard it is to create a backup and c) how confident you are with MySQL maintenance and administration.

An upgrade failure may leave your database in an inconsistent state, in between two versions. It may move an important table to a temporary name and then fail before it recreates the table correctly. It may change a field definition to an incorrect data type. It is very rare for an upgrade to cause irreversible data loss. More often, data corruption occurs which can be reversed by a skilled administrator.

Recovery is often complex. Volunteers on the support forums are unlikely to be impressed if you neglect to make a backup and then need help to recover from upgrade-related corruption. A better outcome is if you can revert to your backup, and then report the bug in the upgrade process which caused the corruption.

Can I keep my LocalSettings.php?
Yes, but you may have to make some minor changes. The format of LocalSettings.php is largely backwards compatible. Changes which break LocalSettings.php compatibility will be documented in the "configuration changes" section of the release notes.

Can my wiki stay online while it is upgrading?
Yes.

If you are upgrading between minor releases of MediaWiki, all you need to do is update the source files.

If you are upgrading between major releases of MediaWiki, the preferred procedure is as follows:


 * 1) Unpack the new version of MediaWiki into a new directory
 * 2) Prepare that new directory: copy your current LocalSettings.php from the old directory, copy any installed extensions and custom skins (if any).
 * 3) Enable read-only mode in LocalSettings.php of the old directory:


 * 1) Run the upgrade script in the new directory.
 * 2) Swap the old directory and the new directory.

How do I change the logo?
The logo that appears in the top left of each page is determined by the $wgLogo configuration line in the LocalSettings.php file.

There are two ways to change the logo:

Upload a picture with your wiki and use that address. This allows the photo to be replaced easily, so you may want to protect the page if you use this method.

Then add the $wgLogo line to LocalSettings.php, for example:

$wgLogo = 'http://www.example.com/wiki/images/6/62/photoname.jpg';

Or upload an image to your server by other means (such as FTP). Add the $wgLogo line to LocalSettings.php, for example:

$wgLogo = "{$wgScriptPath}/photoname.jpg";

In this example, the photo is in the same folder as the LocalSettings.php file.

Do not simply overwrite the default logo installed with MediaWiki ; this file will be overwritten when you upgrade.

Tip: The logo image should be 135 x 135 pixels.

How do I edit the wiki's CSS?
You shouldn't edit the CSS files (such as main.css) directly, because it will make upgrading harder if you need to apply your customizations each time you upgrade the software. Instead you need to edit a wiki page called MediaWiki:Common.css if you want to apply your CSS changes for all skins, or a wiki page called MediaWiki:Monobook.css if you want to apply the customizations only for Monobook skin.

The content of MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Monobook.css pages always override the default CSS styles specified in main.css.

How do I hide the left vertical navigation toolbar
In other words, how do you make the main content div take up 100% of the display, hiding the logo, toolbox, navigation and search engine?

To hide it permanently, put the following in MediaWiki:Common.css:

To instead hide the toolbar when the user presses F11, enter this in your wiki's MediaWiki:Common.js:

How do I customize the logo in the top left corner? Can I?
The logo is a portlet block without a pBody section. It is identified by the p-logo id. The background image is specified by the $wgLogo variable, which is defined in DefaultSettings.php. This location is relative to the web server root and not the system root. Redefine this in LocalSettings.php to change the image. If set wrong there will be no image on the page; check your web server error log and adjust accordingly. However the size of the p-logo will need to be big enough for the logo if it is not to be clipped. This is set in the stylesheet (main.css in Monobook), under the p-logo style, the default setting is:

How do I customize the link-URL of the site-logo in the top left corner of all pages that activates when the site-logo is clicked upon?
By default, clicking the site-logo takes you to the main site-page. If you want to change which internal site-page is the "main" site-page, edit MediaWiki:Mainpage.

To make the link of the site-logo link externally to any other arbitrary URL, for Monobook skin, you'll need to edit the MonoBook.php file, which is normally located in the skins subdirectory. In other words, you need to do a core hack. This core-hack requires that you find and replace  with the URL of your choice. You can also replace  with the desired link title.

Example:

To link the site-logo to your desired URL: Replace with

To also change the alternative text displayed during mouse-rollover, over the site-logo you can replace: with

Note1: The original "alternative text code line" example above may not be found in the source code. The programming syntax at the end of this code line may have to be altered slightly from above, taking care to replace only identically syntaxed elements. Such care should enable a proper code rewrite.

Note 2: After making these changes to your MonoBook.php file, should you wish to test your version of MediaWiki to verify the effectiveness of your most recent file edit, you may have to fully re-initialize your version of MediaWiki before you can see the effects of your changes to the MonoBook.php file. To re-initialize MediaWiki, log out of MediaWiki, then log back into it. You should then be able to see the effect(s) of your recent edit(s) properly displayed by MediaWiki.

Reducing the size of the logo
Note that a tag is on top of the logo so if you are trying to reduce the size of the logo's portlet you will also need to change the #p-logo a and #p-logo a:hover rules. The default setting for these is:

How do I change the icon in the browser's address line (favicon)?

 * Simply upload your favicon.ico to the root of your domain/subdomain, make sure file name is in lower case and its name is favicon.ico
 * Alternatively edit the $wgFavicon setting in LocalSettings.php and add $wgFavicon = "$wgScriptPath/path/to/your/favicon.ico";</tt>

See Manual:$wgFavicon for more details.

Tip: The favicon image should be either 16 x 16 pixels or 32 x 32 pixels.

Rewrite Rule
If you are using a rewrite rule in .htaccess to remove "index.php" from the URL, you will also need to add an exception for .ico files. Simply add the following rule to your .htaccess:


 * RewriteRule .*\.ico$ - [L]

This rule must appear before the index.php rule.

Case sensitivity
When uploading the favicon file, be sure the filename is in lowercase. (That is, "favicon.ico", not "Favicon.ico".) A lot of servers (e.g., those on UNIX-like operating systems) will not be able to find the file unless its name is in lowercase.

How do I customize the navigation bar?
The contents of the navigation bar which appears to the left of each page using the Monobook skin are determined by the MediaWiki:Sidebar page there on your wiki. For information on customising these, please see Manual:Navigation bar.

How do I put a text message (sitenotice) on every page?
Put a text in the MediaWiki:Sitenotice page. It will be displayed on top of every article page.

How do I change which page is the main page?
By default, MediaWiki looks for a page with the title Main Page and serves this as the default page. This can be changed by altering the contents of MediaWiki:Mainpage to point to a different title. If this does not change the 'Main Page' link included on the sidebar at install time, edit MediaWiki:Sidebar.

How do I change the Main Page title?
Simply click on the "Move" tab, and move the page to the desired page title.

Usually you also want to change which page is the main page.

How do I hide the main page title?
MediaWiki does not have a built-in option to hide the main page title (see bug 6129). Instead you must use JavaScript or CSS. Alternately, you can use the NoTitle extension.

MediaWiki version before 1.9, solution to hide the main page title
Before MediaWiki 1.9, you have two options:

Apply the patch
You can manually apply the patch from r17119 to your copy of MediaWiki and use the solution for 1.9.

First replace or add the lines in three files in the correct place as r17119 did:
 * skins/monobook/Skin.php, add:


 * includes/SkinTemplate.php, add:


 * includes/MonoBook.php replace:
 * with:
 * with:

Second follow the instructions in.

JavaScript solution
The following JavaScript may or may not work for your wiki (replace "Main Page" with the name of your main page if it differs). Add the code to your wiki's MediaWiki:Common.js or MediaWiki:Monobook.js (Monobook.js for older wikis, Common.js for newer wikis):

MediaWiki version 1.9+, solution to hide the main page title
In 1.9 and above (or with the modified files above), you can use CSS to hide the main page title.

Add the following to the MediaWiki:Monobook.css (if you're using Monobook; otherwise add this to MediaWiki:Common.css to have it applied to all skins) on your wiki:

Alternatively, you can replace "Main_Page" with another name, but with spaces replaced by underscores _.

Troubleshooting
If this doesn't work, look at the HTML source code to find the correct class to replace "page-Main_Page" with:

If no such class exists, then you cannot use this feature. You may be using a custom or outdated skin.

Another option is to #REDIRECT from Main_Page to Our_Main_Page.

See also w:Wikipedia:Main Page alternatives.

How can I hide the table of contents?
The table of contents (TOC) is automatically shown once there are four or more headings in the article. There are multiple ways to hide it.


 * For one page
 * Place the magic word  </tt> into the page markup.


 * For all pages
 * Add the following rule to MediaWiki:Common.css:

A simpler and more efficient alternative is to edit the file /includes/parser/Parser.php, altering the line in the formatHeadings function the limit of 4 headings:  to a higher value (e.g. 100). This way the table of contents will only be displayed in pages with 100 or more headings, OR in pages which contain one of the magic words  </tt> or   </tt>.
 * Per user
 * Users can also opt to have the table of contents hidden. This is a user preference, set in Special:Preferences.

How do I change the interface text?
Interface text is altered using the MediaWiki namespace. For each deviation from the default in the site language there is a page MediaWiki:Englishmessagename, and for each deviation from the default in each other language a page MediaWiki:Englishmessagename/languagecode. (Since release 1.9 there are no pages for messages equal to the default.). On creation of a page the edit box autofills with the default. When creating a page to override the default it is useful to first save the default version, to allow diffs with it. See also Manual:System message.


 * For a list of system messages, see Special:Allmessages
 * To switch off the MediaWiki namespace, see the $wgUseDatabaseMessages configuration setting
 * To remove the Privacy policy or Disclaimers links at the bottom of each page, set the content of pages MediaWiki:Privacy or MediaWiki:Disclaimers respectively to a single minus sign.

How do I change the interface language?
To change the default interface language, alter the value of $wgLanguageCode</tt> in LocalSettings.php</tt>, for example $wgLanguageCode = "fr";

You may also need to bypass your browser's cache to see the changes.

Changing the default interface language will not affect existing users, so if you're logged in, you will need to change your language settings in your preferences. If you want to change the language settings for all existing users, use the userOptions.php maintenance script. For instance, to have all users with English set use French instead, run

php userOptions.php language --old en --new fr

How can I prevent editing by anonymous users?
The recommended method is by changing the value of the  configuration option. Edit  and add the line:

For more information on using this option, see the Preventing access page and Manual:User rights.

How do I remove the article/edit etc tabs for users who are not logged in?
Edit MediaWiki:Monobook.css on your wiki, and add this:

li#ca-edit { display: none; }

See the page source for the various #ca-* ids used in the content tabs.

Note: this will only work for MonoBook (the default skin), and doesn't actually stop people editing.

How do I add/remove tabs throughout my wiki?
Use Extension:DynamicTabs or write your own extension:

For example, to remove the talk tab and then add a tab that always goes to the main page you would save this code in : and then add to the bottom of LocalSettings.php

How do I remove a tab on only one page?
''This solution works in MediaWiki version 1.9 and above. In MediaWiki version 1.8 or below, first apply the above patch.''

For example, to remove the Discussion (talk) page tab from the Main Page, on the MediaWiki:Monobook.css page add:

To modify MediaWiki:Monobook.css you must have administrative privileges.

See also: Manual:Hide page tabs

How do I remove a tab on all pages
''This solution works in MediaWiki version 1.9 and above. In MediaWiki version 1.8 or below, first apply the above patch.''

For example, to remove the Discussion (talk) page tab on all wikipages, on the MediaWiki:Monobook.css page add:

Other tabs to remove are #ca-history and #ca-viewsource. To modify MediaWiki:Monobook.css you must have administrative privileges.

How do I hide the section edit links for users who are not logged in?
Edit  and add the line:
 * 1) The recommended method is by changing the value of the  configuration option.


 * 1) Alternatively you could manually edit each skin (e.g. ) and add this before  :


 * Replace #ca-edit with #ca-viewsource if you disabled editing for anonymous users. Use .editsection for older MW versions.
 * If you want to hide the links for all users including logged in users, instead edit the page  and add:


 * Also see How can I prevent editing by anonymous users?

How do I remove the "Talk for this IP" link at the top right when $wgDisableAnonTalk is true?
Set $wgShowIPinHeader to false.

How do I remove the "Create an Account or Login" link at the top right of the screen?
In Monobook.php change this statement: to:

How can I suppress actions and special pages?

 * NOTE: MediaWiki is not designed for this kind of usage! It should be noted that the following 'answer' is a hack that only 'works' with the Apache webserver. Note also that this system is not foolproof, its just one step further than hiding the links (see above).

Suppressing actions and special pages can be useful when you want to create the illusion of a static website via a particular URL or VirtualHost, but also have an 'internal' view that is a true wiki. i.e. if you have an inward facing 'view' of your wiki that users can edit, and an outward facing 'view' that should appear like a static website (no history, no discussion, etc., etc.).

After hiding all the appropriate links (see above), if you are using the Apache web server, you can disable actions and special pages using the following rewrite rules:


 * 1) Lock down the site (disable MediaWiki commands)

RewriteEngine On


 * 1) RewriteLog /tmp/rewrite.log


 * 1) RewriteLogLevel 9


 * 1) See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Parameters_to_index.php#Actions

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*action=.*) RewriteRule .* http://www.my.domain.com?

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php/Special:Search RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*Special:.*) RewriteRule .* http://www.my.domain.com?

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*Special:.*) RewriteRule .* http://www.my.domain.com?
 * 1) Catch a trick...

Above, a request for, for example, will be simply rewritten to. Similarly any page in the Special namespace (with the exception of Special:Search) will be rewritten to. Remember, this is only a hack, and isn't intended as a solution for a secure CMS.

Note that you will need to adjust the above rules to match your specific URL naming schema.

Other issues to consider when trying to lock down a site like this is the API and POST requests for the wiki content (rather than GET).

How do I change the footer?

 * See: Manual:Footer, Manual:Skinning, Manual:Configuration settings

How can I edit / remove the Powered by MediaWiki image in the footer?
You can hide the Powered by MediaWiki image by adding the following to your wiki's MediaWiki:Common.css:

The Vector skin equivalent is:

If you want to remove it completely, you could alter /skins/MonoBook.php</tt>, which contains the following code that makes the Powered by MediaWiki image appear in the footer: If you would like to remove this image completely, or edit the image, you must locate and edit poweredbyico. It is located in skins/common/images/</tt> and the image is called <tt>poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png</tt>.

If you're happy with the logo (or not) and simply want to change the destination link, the code is in getPoweredBy function of includes\Skin.php. Just change the line  $img = '<a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/"><img src="'.$url.'" alt="Powered by MediaWiki" /></a>';  to whatever.

How can I change what the of each page is? Where do I make changes?
Most of the text that you want to change can be found in the namespace of MediaWiki.

In order to change titles, texts, announcements, etc., go to Special:Allmessages, where you will see the text associated with the pages you wish to change. You need to log in as an administrator to edit the protected entries in the MediaWiki namespace.

If you want to change the title in your browser, you need to edit MediaWiki:Pagetitle. Go there and edit it just like you would any other page in your wiki.

In recent versions of MediaWiki, MediaWiki:Pagetitle is $1 - by default. If is producing the wrong text for you, you need to set $wgSitename in your LocalSettings.php.

If $wgSitename is correct in LocalSettings.php but is still wrong, it may be that you're using a user-contributed language file which incorrectly sets $wgSitename to a transliteration of "Wikipedia". Edit the language file to correct this. For example, the Hebrew language file is at <tt>languages/LanguageHe.php</tt> in your wiki directory.

Don't forget to clear your browser cache after you change your settings.

How do I make external links open in a new window?
See Opening external links in a new window.

How can I suppress MediaWiki from formatting URLs, tags, etc?
Put "  " tags around the URL or tag. Example: svn co http://svn.example.com/myproject/ produces: svn co http://svn.example.com/myproject/

How can I force users to preview before they save?
See Manual:Force preview and Extension:ForcePreview.

How do I add more buttons on the edit page?
For adding more toolbar buttons above the edit field, you can use JavaScript code to register them in <tt>mwCustomEditButtons</tt> in your MediaWiki:Common.js. For example, a button for large text:

The following page is a more complex example which can work from an empty wiki: w:MediaWiki:Common.js/edit.js.

How can I get more special characters or tags clickable on the edit page?
For adding more selectable special characters, etc, below the edit field, see Extension:CharInsert.

How can I use Wikipedia's new skin (Vector) on my wiki?
Vector is not available in MediaWiki versions prior to 1.16, and will will be made default skin in 1.17. See here for information on configuring your default skin.

How do I edit a page?
To edit a page, simply click the edit link that appears on each page. Using the default MonoBook skin, this is in the form of a tab at the top of the page. A form will appear, containing the existing markup. When you have finished making modifications, click the Save button to commit your changes.

See also:

How do I create a new page?
There are several ways to create a new page:

On some wikis, a failed search for a page will contain a link which allows you to edit that page.
 * Create a link to the page on another page, then click on the red link which appears
 * Browse to the intended location of the page, e.g. http://www.example.com/index.php?title=New_page and click on the edit link.

See Help:Starting a new page

How do I delete an old version of a page?
Old versions of page data are retained in the database and can be accessed via the page history features. This is useful for reviewing changes and correcting or reverting undesirable ones, but in some cases, administrators might want to make this information unavailable, for legal reasons, or to reduce the size of the database.


 * Administrators can delete an old revision of a page by deleting the page, and then selectively undeleting revisions to be kept
 * The Oversight extension (also known as HideRevision) can be used to move harmful revisions out of page histories
 * For newer MediaWikis (1.14+), you can enable the core RevisionDelete feature that allows privileged users to remove single revisions from page histories
 * The <tt>maintenance/deleteOldRevisions.php</tt> maintenance script can mass-delete all old revisions of pages and their associated text records.
 * See also: Manual:Removing embarrassment.

Are there any editing tutorials available?
There are several editing tutorials available, mostly on Wikimedia sister projects, such as Wikipedia. There are also markup references, etc. available on Meta.


 * Editing help content on Meta
 * The How to edit a page guide on the English Wikipedia

How do I view the printable form of a page?
MediaWiki includes stylesheets which automatically style a page appropriately when it is printed; using the print or print preview function within your browser ought to render the page in a printable form.

You can also view this printable form using the printable version link in the toolbox.

Importing from MediaWiki XML dumps
See Manual:Importing XML dumps

Importing from other types of wiki software
Note: The following is directly copied from old meta FAQ. It might need to be corrected.

There is some documentation about importing in the UPGRADE file distributed with MediaWiki.

To follow on from those, this is how at least one individual imported pages from usemod to MediaWiki:

Because MediaWiki does not automatically link to CamelCase style links, you will need to add brackets  to all your links. You can do this with the following:

First, obtain ImportStage1.txt (or whatever you want to call it) from the importUseModWiki.php script ( use > to pipe the output to a file )

Second, do

sed '/Importing/!s/\ [A-Z]\w*[a-z]\w*[A-Z]\w*[a-zA-Z]/\ \[\[&\]\] /g' ImportStage1.txt > ImportStage2.txt

This should create proper links in place of your CamelCase links.

This doesn't work so well for SubPage links - someone care to fix?

Then,

sed 's/upload\:\w*\.\w*/http\:\/\/aberwiki\.org\/uploads\/& /g' ImportStage2.txt > ImportStage3.txt

This fixes your upload links. Change the replace text so it fills in your url such as http://www.yourwiki.org/uploads/filename

You are now ready to import ImportStage3.txt into your database with a command such as

mysql -u -p < ImportStage3.txt

Note: If your  outputs an XML file instead of SQL statements, this probably means you have a rather new version of MediaWiki. In such a case, you can import the XML file -- see Importing a Wikipedia database dump into MediaWiki, towards the bottom of the page ('Import XML'). Don't forget to rebuild all the tables -- that page also explains how to do that.

Importing from other types of files
Here are some info on importing from other types of files:


 * Massive text files importing
 * Massive image files uploading
 * Tools to converter from html to MediaWiki, and this.
 * Tools to converter from Microsoft .chm help files to MediaWiki
 * Converting tools from Microsoft Office files to MediaWiki

MediaWiki auto importing script
Taken from wiki_import - MediaWiki auto import script:

Description
The script is designed to import a whole folder of files into MediaWiki, with the folder directory tree mapped as wiki category hierarchy.

Features

 * economic, build wiki site from existing knowledge base collection without "double-entry"
 * persistent, map folder directory tree as wiki category hierarchy
 * sophisticated, import/handle all well-known file types automatically
 * complete, cover every applicable scenario, even the case when you need to control access to individual wiki pages
 * versatile, highly customizable

Quick Help
<tt> wiki_import.sh $ $Revision: 1.1 $

mediawiki automatic file import script

Usage: wiki_import.sh [OPTIONS]...

The script is designed to import a whole folder of files into mediawiki, with the folder directory tree mapped as wiki category hierarchy.

The specification of the file-to-import is passed from standard input.

Options: -s, --sect=n    the root category section of the wiki of the imported article (mandatory) -1, --header    include standard header (category hierarchy path & notice) -l, --link      link to actual file on the web site -f, --footer    include standard footer (article category) -R, --res[=p]   add restricted tag in the footer as '' (default=`$_opt_sect')

Configuration Options: -p, --php=fn    mediawiki import php script specification -r, --root=n    the root category name for the whole wiki site -m, --max=n     max_allowed_packet for mysqld to import -u, --user=n    wiki user used for the import -a, --arch=p    the root url that linked-to archive files based on

Examples:

echo ./path/to/file.ext | wiki_import.sh -1 -l -f -s 'Customer Support' -R </tt>

For the rest of details, check out wiki_import.

Templates imported from other wikis (such as Wikipedia) don't work for me
You probably need to install some extensions used on the source wiki, such as ParserFunctions or sometimes Cite. Also, make sure that you copied all site CSS and JavaScript required by the template.

I want to have multiple wikis, but only require registration once

 * If you're starting from scratch or you're switching from one wiki to multiple, you can use $wgSharedDB and $wgSharedTables to have all wikis share the user table of the "main" wiki. You can share other tables as well, as long as they don't contain any data dependent on non-shared tables or data specific to one wiki. See Manual:Shared database for examples and more information.
 * If your wikis are already established and you want to switch to a single sign-on, you can use the CentralAuth extension. It has a few more features than a shared user table, but its more difficult to configure and its tailored toward a Wikimedia-style setup. However, it is easier than attempting to completely merge multiple user tables into one.

How can I allow use of HTML tags?
See Manual:$wgRawHtml as well as Manual:$wgGroupPermissions and Manual:Preventing access.

This can be easily abused to attack users

See Extension:SecureHTML and Extension:HTMLets for ways to make this safer.

How can I allow uploading of HTML files?
See Manual:Allowing HTML Uploads.

This can be easily abused to attack users

…is the Help namespace empty?
We don't currently have a clean, internationalised set of help pages under a free license. A few developers are hoping to make this possible; however, the Help namespace currently ships in a blank state. You are free to add your own help pages, copy the Public Domain help pages or copy certain of the items from Meta, e.g. the user guide or MediaWiki Handbook, these two collections being free to use under the GNU Free Documentation License.

…are some of my images not showing up after an upgrade?
Several users have reported that, following an upgrade or a moving of their wiki, several images fail to be shown inline. The files exist, and the image description pages show a MIME type of <tt>unknown / unknown</tt> and, in some cases, a warning about potentially dangerous files.

To fix this, run the <tt>maintenance/rebuildImages.php</tt> script from the command line. This will set MIME information for each file in the database.

…are all PNG files not being turned into thumbnails?
After upgrading to a more recent version of PHP, it is possible a different MimeMagic.php function is being used to detect file MIME types, particularly the built-in PHP function mime_content_type, which fails to detect PNG files. Search the web for mime_content_type png for information on fixing this bug at the PHP level, possibly by editing your magic.mime file.

See here for more info.

…is a search for a short keyword giving no hits?
By default, MediaWiki uses MyISAM's fulltext matching functionality to allow searching page content. The default settings for this mean that words of less than four characters won't be indexed, so will be ignored in searches with older versions of MediaWiki.

MediaWiki 1.13 and earlier are unable to work around this; you must either change MySQL's configuration to index shorter words, or upgrade to a more recent version of MediaWiki.

Note that some particular words may still not be indexed if they are in MySQL's default stopword list.

…can't I download MediaWiki ?
MediaWiki is in a development state at present, and has not been packaged into a general release. The code can be downloaded from Subversion if desired. Or, if you want the latest revision packaged as an archive, get it from MediaWiki Nightly Dumps on Toolserver.

…doesn't this work? It works on Wikipedia!
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia web sites use the current version of the code in development; at present, this is MediaWiki, pulled from the wmf-deployment branch. Coupled with the use of several extensions, this means that functionality between these wikis and your particular setup may differ.


 * To obtain the current development code, read download from SVN
 * To check what version a Wikimedia wiki is running, as well as what extensions are installed, visit the Special:Version page for that wiki

…do I get a 403 Forbidden error after setting permissions on my Fedora system?
Fedora Core enables SELinux by default. Instructions for setting SELinux permissions for MediaWiki are available.

…do I get logged out constantly?
This is probably related to cookies or session data, for example a problem with PHP's session.save_path setting. See Log in problems.

…is it a good idea to keep user accounts?
At many times you just want to remove a user account out of the wiki either because it belonged to a spammer account or you just feel like it. The appropriate choice is to block the account or rename it if needed. Here is why:

Do I just remove his row from the User table?

Rob Church posted the following regarding this issue on the mediawiki-l mailing list:

"If the user has made edits, then removing rows from the user table cause theoretical loss of referential integrity. Now, to be honest with you, I can't think of any conditions where this would cause an actual problem; "undefined behaviour" is the phrase we use.

What I'd suggest doing, to be on the safe side, is running a couple of quick updates against the database:



What this will do is cause MediaWiki to treat the revisions as having been made anonymously when generating things like page histories, which should eliminate any problems caused by these routines attempting to check user details from other tables.

If the user has caused log entries, i.e. rows in the logging table, or uploaded images, then the situation becomes trickier, as you'll have to start mopping up all the rows everywhere and it could become a bit of a mess, so if the user's done anything other than edit, I would strongly recommend just blocking them indefinitely.

If the username is offensive or undesirable, then you could consider renaming it using the RenameUser extension."

Where do I get the spam blacklist from and how do I install it?
The spam blacklist extension can be found in Subversion, just like all other officially supported extensions. For installation and configuration instructions, consult the README file and extension page over here.

How do I use $wgSpamRegex to block more than one string?
$wgSpamRegex is a powerful filter for page content. Adding multiple items to the regex, however, can be awkward. Consider this snippet:

This example code allows convenient addition of additional items to the regex without fiddling about each time. It also demonstrates two popular filters, which block some of the most common spam attacks.


 * See also: Extension:SpamRegex

Is there additional ways to fight spam ?
See Manual:Combating spam for an overview of anti-spam measures such as Captcha, content filtering and restricting edition.

Anti-vandalism
See Manual:Combating vandalism for hints and suggestions on how to deal with wiki vandalism.

I've found a bug or have a feature request. Where do I post it?
Bugs and feature requests should be posted on MediaZilla, our implementation of Bugzilla. Please search the database prior to posting, to avoid creating duplicate entries.

I'm getting a strange error. What now?

 * See if it is covered by Manual:Errors and Symptoms
 * Try to find out more about the problem, see How to debug MediaWiki
 * See the section below for information on how to contact developers and other knowledgabe users.

I have a question not answered here. Where do I go next?
If you've exhausted the FAQ above, please try the following:


 * Check the other sources of help on this site
 * Search the rest of this site
 * Search older documentation archived on Meta; Useful developer documentation remains on Meta.wikimedia.org in the category Pages to be exported to MediaWiki.org until the m:Meta:MetaProject to transfer content to MediaWiki.org completes
 * Search the web
 * Dig into the source
 * See the section below for information on how to contact developers and other knowledgeable users.

Still no luck. Where can I ask for help?

 * Post a message at Project:Support desk
 * Email the mediawiki-l mailing list (perhaps search the archive first).
 * Ask the developers in our IRC channel (Freenode network, channel #mediawiki).

Recommended reading

 * Asking smart questions
 * Effective bug reporting
 * Getting help on IRC
 * Mizanur Rahman, MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide, ISBN 1904811590
 * Daniel J. Barrett, MediaWiki, ISBN 9780596519797