Topic on Project:Support desk

Hi MediWiki makers,

I am using MediaWiki in my company since 7 years now, which turned out to be a big success story: 2500 articles and 2Million page views in a community of 80 engineers!

This was created for one design site. But now, my world went bigger - I am responsible for ~20 design sites, so I intended to start a second wiki on another server. My intention is to keep wiki 1 running (never change a winning team, right?).

However, some of the articles in wiki1 are interesting also in the bigger group.

Any best practice you have for me how to set up wiki 2 is more than welcome. Especially: Is there a possibility, that a search in wiki2 extends the search automatically into wiki1 if nothing was found? and: What is the best method for common articles (like redirects between the wikis? - or something better?)

Thanks a lot for your help !

PS: Searched the help topics, found a bit, but not quite what I was looking for. Sorry if I should have overseen something.

You probably want to set up a wiki farm and have an aggregate search. I don't know how to do the aggregate search, but @Cindy.cicalese has done a lot of work on wiki farms and may have some pointers for you.

Thanks a lot Mark. I will reach out ot Cindy.

We use interwiki linking [0] and some transclusion [1,2] to share content between wikis in our wiki farms. What we use past that we have developed in house and is still experimental. We prototyped several extensions that allow search and diff across wikis in a wiki farm using the interwiki table, but they are not yet ready to be released. Our VIKI extension [3] allows you to create and traverse a network graph of your wiki. We created a plugin for VIKI that allows the network graph to cross wiki boundaries using information from the interwiki table, but we have not yet had a chance to release that plugin.

This is a topic that we would like to address further when time permits.

[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interwiki

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Transclusion

[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgEnableScaryTranscluding

[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VIKI