Manual:Wiki in site root directory

Why to, or not, use the root directory of a Web site as the wiki directory.

Template:Wiki-in-docroot links here and is used in Manual:Short URL. Details needed below.

Reasons why putting wiki pages in the root directory of the web site is bad
Use the configuration used by Wikipedia if you want to be on the safe side.
 * You need special rules for robots.txt or favicon.ico, also for all wiki support files like skin images. See
 * Any scheme which does this is not supported by the MediaWiki developers. So if your scheme doesn't work with a new MediaWiki version, you're on your own.

TODO: Add mailing list references and expand the above

Wiki specific domainnames or subdomainnames
I like these two examples for sites that are predominantly wiki. If wiki is to be the dominant paradigm of a site, then no special wiki directory is needed and to use one is redundant and counter intuitive.
 * http://wiki.example.com/Article_name
 * http://cookbookwiki.com/Main_Page

Why should above be deprecated? Please be specific, of course.


 * Frankly, I'd agree. There should be better guides to getting this to work - I've tried everything on this site, including the Mediawiki type one (which I wouldn't prefer, but would be better than the huge and ugly URL I'm getting at the moment - /mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page is a huge waste of space when I only need /Main_Page for my site.


 * I strongly agree as well. This is really irritating -- we want to put the site's main wiki on a separate machine, and wiki.example.com/wiki/ is silly versus wiki.example.com/

The above is deprecated because some automated agents (web crawlers) and some user agents (web browsers) would inevitably request some files from your root directory that are not articles. Have a pair of good examples:

If  sounds silly to you (and it really does), you should use some much shorter name for your virtual directory; for example, just use   (unless you've already used   to store MediaWiki engine there physically, as Manual:Short URL recommends; if I were you, I would store the MediaWiki engine in the site's root, and thus   would work) or use any other one-letter name of the virtual directory. Any directory name is fine for your virtual directory as long as the same name is not occupied with a real directory. Your virtual directory may correspond to the real root, if  is empty and your MediaWiki's   and   are on the root, and so you may replace   with   without any problems. The problem is that you should not try to eliminate  without any replacement at all; otherwise you would inevitably face dire problems with clients trying to request non-article files from your server.