Academic hub/kjp

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

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

Account Creation

Vampire Model

The vampire model consists of two rules:

1. only registered users may edit
2. 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 his/her students. Because MediaWiki logs all account activity it is (relatively) easy to track accountability for creation of spam/bot accounts.

Authentication

Extension:LDAP Authentication

Leverage an existing LDAP (including Microsoft Active Directory, Kerberos) as a single sign-on

Alternatives:

Extension:Windows NTLM LDAP Auto Auth

Authorization

• Manual:Preventing_access
• Manual:Block_and_unblock
• Extension:EditSubpages
• Security issues with authorization extensions

Document Management

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Extension:ParserFunctions

Bundled with core, required for complex templating including most WP templates.

Extension:WikiEditor

2010-era wikitext editor sponsored by WikiMedia.

Vector

A Polished skin for MediaWiki that comes bundled by default. Enable Extension:Vector for advanced functionality for this skin.

Extension:Cite

Display 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.

Extension:TableEdit

Forms-based editor for wiki-tables.

Navigation & Search

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:Lucene-search -- more complicated but more robust still, used by large wikis like Wikipedia

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:

Extension:DynamicPageList

See also

• Glossary entry defining the use of the term academic wiki on the MediaWiki wiki
• List of academic MediaWiki sites