Manual:System administration

This page documents common administrative tasks which you may wish to perform once your installation of MediaWiki is completed.

Configuration

 * See Manual:Configuration

MediaWiki has serveral of configuration settings. They must be modified in LocalSettings.php. See Manual:Configuration settings for the whole list.

Toggle uploads on and off

 * See Manual:Configuring file uploads

Choosing a design: Selecting a skin

 * See Manual:Skin configuration

Currently, the following skins are available:

The default skin can be adjusted by modifying the $wgDefaultSkin variable in LocalSettings.php. A few other settings can also be adjusted regarding skins.

There're also some custom skins, see Gallery of user styles.

Setting administrative rights
MediaWiki is a permissions-based wiki system. That means that users will only be able to perform the actions they are allowed to do. As declaring permissions individually for every user would be tedious and impractical, several User rights are pre-defined in MediaWiki. You are also allowed to declare new user groups, as your needs require. Individual extensions may also require creating new user rights.

Regardless of how they are created, user groups are fully customizable, by modifying the $wgGroupPermissions associative array in your LocalSettings.php file.


 * Manual:User rights management
 * Manual:Preventing access
 * Manual:Security

Sysop (Administrator)
The most common use. A user marked as 'sysop' can delete and undelete pages, block and unblock IPs and use a shortcut revert-to-previous-contributor's-revision feature in contribs, see Manual:Administrators for more information.

Bureaucrat
Users in this group can change user rights through Special:UserRights.

Bot
A registered bot account. Edits by an account with this set will not appear by default in Recentchanges; this is intended for mass imports of data without flooding human edits from view. (Add &hidebots=0 to list changes made by bots e.g. like this)

Installing extensions

 * See Manual:Extensions

Extensions are compilations of PHP code that add new features or enhance functionality of the main MediaWiki core.

Localization

 * See Manual:System message

MediaWiki's interface has been translated in over 100 languages, and the interface text can be altered with minimal effort. The internationalized messages are located in the MediaWiki namespace of your wiki and can be edited by finding the correct page and modifying it (needs an account with the 'editinterface' right, by default the sysop group). A list of these pages, the default message, and, if applicable, the altered message, can be found in Special:Allmessages.

If you simply want to change the language of a wiki on a per-user basis, this can be done via Special:Preferences. If you selected the wrong language when setting up the wiki simply change the $wgLanguageCode in LocalSettings.php.

As features are continuously added to MediaWiki, interface text may not be fully translated. If you translate part of the interface, please submit your changes to Bugzilla so other users can use them. You might also consider participating in the Betawiki project, which is dedicated to translating MediaWiki into as many languages as possible. See also Localisation.

Maintenance scripts

 * See  Manual:Maintenance scripts

MediaWiki has some maintenance script to help doing administrative tasks.

Back up

 * See Manual:Backing up a wiki

It is important to make regular backups of the data in your wiki. This includes the database, uploaded files and extensions.

Upgrading MediaWiki

 * See Manual:Upgrading

Importing a database dump

 * See Manual:Importing XML dumps

If you want a local copy of a Wikimedia wiki, see the overview at meta:Data dumps and the download site.

Converting (importing) existing content

 * See Manual:Importing external content

Some scripts exist to import data from other wiki engines.

Changing the tagline
A way to change the tagline that appears on top of every page just below the page title (but by default is hidden in Monobook skin except when printing pages) is to modify the MediaWiki:Tagline system message that if undefined defaults to.

Add the following to MediaWiki:Common.css if you want the tagline to display in all skins, or to MediaWiki:Monobook.css if you want to adjust only the Monobook skin:

If you don't like the way it looks (the HTML displaying the text is H3 that displays bold by default in most browsers) add some CSS style declarations to that, eg: