Limitations

This page attempts to document the limitations of the MediaWiki software.

No per-page access restrictions
MediaWiki is not designed to be a Content Management System (CMS), or to protect sensitive data. To the contrary, it was designed to be as open as possible. Thus it does not inherently support full featured, air-tight protection of private content.

Limitations on titles
There are several limitations on the titles of pages; they are described at.

Extensibility
MediaWiki is very extensible and many limitations of MediaWiki can be addressed by installing an extension.


 * While the special page lists all installed extensions in a wiki, if a wiki has many extensions, it can be hard to figure out for users which extension enables which feature.
 * Extensions usually do not include their documentation, instead the documentation of extensions usually resides on mediawiki.org, which can be problematic when you want to use MediaWiki without an internet connection.

Wikitext
Wikitext is notoriously difficult to parse to an abstract syntax tree because it has many intricacies. Since 2011 work is being done to replace MediaWiki's parser with a round-tripping parser in the form of the project.

Template logic
MediaWiki templates can become very complicated and hard to understand, especially when the logic is split up across several templates and are involved. A good alternative to such complicated templates is, which allows even complex template logic to be written in an easily readable manner in.

API stability
The MediaWiki PHP API is actively being developed. Hooks and functions of the MediaWiki PHP API sometimes get deprecated as per the. When deprecated functions get removed extensions that use these functions have to be updated or they will break.

API documentation in English
The API documentation at https://doc.wikimedia.org/ is generally only available in English.