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I want to start a wiki like wikiHow experts can you help me?

6
Kunalyadav1234 (talkcontribs)

Please help me in creating a wiki like wikiHow

Malyacko (talkcontribs)
Bawolff (talkcontribs)

User:Jack Phoenix might know about what wikihow specific stuff is still publicly available. Unfortunately wikihow close sourced much of their code.

Jack Phoenix (talkcontribs)

The ShoutHow project, a side project of mine, aims at improving original, first-party extensions (and other code) created by wikiHow in order to provide an experience comparable to that of the "real deal". It's a hodgepodge of upstream MediaWiki + skins + extensions (currently based on MW 1.35.2) + wikiHow extensions + skin(s) + custom core patches + custom extensions. There is an installation manual available and patches are always welcome, but regardless, you should treat it as alpha-grade research code rather than something you can immediately deploy even if it is indeed based on real wikiHow code.

For those curious: wikiHow closed down the self-serve source code portal, src.wikihow.com, in November 2020, as per this discussion. But even before that, there had been a fair amount of closed-source bits 'n' pieces in the codebase, such as various backend scripts etc. that have a MW special page front-end. Additionally the skin was sorta made closed source in late 2014 as wikiHow removed the skins directory from the public source code dumps altogether. That said, the older, non-responsive skin (skins/Owl) was made obsolete at some point and wikiHow.com has used the responsive skin from extensions/MobileFrontendWikihow for quite some time. I was unable to figure out how to make that the default on a more vanilla installation (such as ShoutHow).

Overall I suggest that you focus on the specific features you want and see if there are extensions that can achieve the desired result. One of the reasons the ShoutHow platform is essentially a fork of MediaWiki is that not only are there some (small-ish) core hacks to core MediaWiki files, but a lot of the extensions etc. depend on each other and also the skins (though I have been working on improving the cross-skin-compatibility with the ultimate goal that you could be using whatever skin you want and all pages still render as expected; wikiHow did not and does not allow any other skins than the site default, so their developers do not test features with any other skin, obviously).

2001:4BC9:A47:EF1F:A9E3:4B44:1B15:FDAD (talkcontribs)

this is a very nice project of yours!

do you have a working demo or showcase websites that use your code?

Jack Phoenix (talkcontribs)

Thank you for the kind words, they're much appreciated!

Alas, there's no public demo of this or anything; though my original comment was written in July 2021, nothing has really changed in that regard (other than that, as per version lifecycle etc., the current LTS version of upstream MediaWiki is 1.39 and 1.35 is the legacy LTS release). The software is still there, the installation guide is hopefully accurate enough to be usable in installing it and the listed installation requirements are also likely to be accurate enough.

Unless you're a die-hard MediaWiki enthusiast or being paid to work on this (or both!), I'd be very wary of running this on a public server. Though I've tried to fix all the issues I've come across, whether security or regular bugs, there are no doubt more than plenty of them left.

Luckily, for many features, there are great, maintained alternatives that work with a "vanilla" MediaWiki. For example:

Full disclaimer: I maintain ArticleFeedbackv5 (for some definition of the word maintain, anyway), SocialProfile and the entire social tools family of extensions, so I'm of course somewhat biased. :-)

Either way, you should consider the question "what features [from wikiHow] do I want?" and then start searching for maintained extensions to fulfill your need for such features.

Of course I'd be more than happy to receive contributions from you or anyone else, but the sheer size of the ShoutHow project is daunting and there's a lot of undocumented...well, everything, really. Not just code, but there's no user-facing documentation for a lot of things. Furthermore, that is pretty much why it'll be very tricky, annoying and time-consuming to move the platform to MediaWiki 1.39 in the future. As said, core hacks aren't something you ever should do, and when you start to need more than two hands' fingers to count the amount of core hacks you have, you have really messed up somewhere and you need a paid team of competent developers to maintain them, probably (or better yet, rewrite them in a fashion which does not require the usage of core hacks). That's one of the reasons why I can't really recommend using this silly research project of mine anywhere as of now.

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