Academic hub
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
[edit]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.
Access Control
[edit]Account Creation
[edit]Vampire Model
[edit]The vampire model consists of two rules:
- only registered users may edit
- 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
[edit]- Extension:LDAPAuthentication2
- Leverage an existing LDAP (including Microsoft Active Directory, Kerberos) as a single sign-on
Authorization
[edit]- Manual:Preventing access
- Manual:Block and unblock
- Extension:EditSubpages
- Security issues with authorization extensions
Content security
[edit]- Extension:AccessControl
- Collaboration with commercial entities on academic projects, may require site content security. This extension has been created for this purpose.
Document Management
[edit]Editing
[edit]- Extension:ParserFunctions
- Bundled with core, required for complex templating including most WP templates.
- Extension:Scribunto
- Bundled with core, required for especially complex templating including many WP templates.
- Extension:WikiEditor
- Bundled with core, 2010-era wikitext editor sponsored by Wikimedia.
- Vector
- A Polished skin for MediaWiki that comes bundled by default.
- Extension:Cite
- Bundled with core, displays 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.
Navigation & Search
[edit]- 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: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:
See also
[edit]- Glossary entry defining the use of the term academic wiki on the MediaWiki wiki
- List of academic MediaWiki sites