DOCSLIB.ORG

How Does Mediawiki Work? 1 How Does Mediawiki Work?

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
How Does Mediawiki Work? 1 How Does Mediawiki Work? How does MediaWiki work? 1 How does MediaWiki work? Fundamental Introduction to MediaWiki Contents • How does MediaWiki work? • Documentation • Customization • Versions & Download • Installation • Support & Contact • Development All other topics • See navigation on the left You probably know Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and may possibly be a little bit confused by similar, but different, words such as Wiki, Wikimedia or MediaWiki. To avoid a possible confusion between the words you may first want to read the article about the names where the differences are explained. General Overview MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It's designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database. MediaWiki can be used in large enterprise server farms as in the Wikimedia Foundation cluster. Pages use MediaWiki's wikitext format, so that users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit them easily. When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the filesystem. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software. How does MediaWiki work? 2 Try out Wikitext Yes, you can easily modify pages and you can (temporarily) publish dummy sentences, and you can even (temporarily) completely destroy a page in a wiki. You don't need to have any programming skills to do this. We suggest you exercise yourself within our sandbox. Please isolate your testing there, though: the admins might not take too kindly to your mischief otherwise. You can also look up the cheat sheet with basic formatting commands. Basic wikitext (wiki markup) Language: English Article Sources and Contributors 3 Article Sources and Contributors How does MediaWiki work? Source: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?oldid=330878 Contributors: Anonymous Dissident, Bdk, Bjørn, Diego Grez, HappyDog, Hashar, Hendrik Brummermann, IAlex, Jake Remington, Remington and the Rattlesnakes, Robchurch, Tim Starling, ZsigE, 33 anonymous edits Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors Image:Tournesol.png Source: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Tournesol.png License: GNU Free Documentation License Contributors: User:Anthere, User:Raul654 Image:Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg Source: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg License: logo Contributors: Wikimedia. Image:Wikimedia Servers.svg Source: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_Servers.svg License: logo Contributors: User:Sansculotte Image:Wikitext-wiki markup-wikipedia.png Source: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikitext-wiki_markup-wikipedia.png License: GNU General Public License Contributors: (text: main parts written by Andrewa in November 2004, cf. history, adapted later by several other users) License Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported http:/ / creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by-sa/ 3. 0/.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Position Description Addenda
    POSITION DESCRIPTION January 2014 Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director - Addenda The Wikimedia Foundation is a radically transparent organization, and much information can be found at www.wikimediafoundation.org . That said, certain information might be particularly useful to nominators and prospective candidates, including: Announcements pertaining to the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Search Kicking off the search for our next Executive Director by Former Wikimedia Foundation Board Chair Kat Walsh An announcement from Wikimedia Foundation ED Sue Gardner by Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner Video Interviews on the Wikimedia Community and Foundation and Its History Some of the values and experiences of the Wikimedia Community are best described directly by those who have been intimately involved in the organization’s dramatic expansion. The following interviews are available for viewing though mOppenheim.TV . • 2013 Interview with Former Wikimedia Board Chair Kat Walsh • 2013 Interview with Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner • 2009 Interview with Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner Guiding Principles of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Community The following article by Sue Gardner, the current Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, has received broad distribution and summarizes some of the core cultural values shared by Wikimedia’s staff, board and community. Topics covered include: • Freedom and open source • Serving every human being • Transparency • Accountability • Stewardship • Shared power • Internationalism • Free speech • Independence More information can be found at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner/Wikimedia_Foundation_Guiding_Principles Wikimedia Policies The Wikimedia Foundation has an extensive list of policies and procedures available online at: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Policies Wikimedia Projects All major projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed by users around the world using the MediaWiki software.
    [Show full text]
  • A Topic-Aligned Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Articles for Studying Information Asymmetry in Low Resource Languages
    Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 2373–2380 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC A Topic-Aligned Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Articles for Studying Information Asymmetry in Low Resource Languages Dwaipayan Roy, Sumit Bhatia, Prateek Jain GESIS - Cologne, IBM Research - Delhi, IIIT - Delhi [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Wikipedia is the largest web-based open encyclopedia covering more than three hundred languages. However, different language editions of Wikipedia differ significantly in terms of their information coverage. We present a systematic comparison of information coverage in English Wikipedia (most exhaustive) and Wikipedias in eight other widely spoken languages (Arabic, German, Hindi, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). We analyze the content present in the respective Wikipedias in terms of the coverage of topics as well as the depth of coverage of topics included in these Wikipedias. Our analysis quantifies and provides useful insights about the information gap that exists between different language editions of Wikipedia and offers a roadmap for the Information Retrieval (IR) community to bridge this gap. Keywords: Wikipedia, Knowledge base, Information gap 1. Introduction other with respect to the coverage of topics as well as Wikipedia is the largest web-based encyclopedia covering the amount of information about overlapping topics.
    [Show full text]
  • Wikibase Knowledge Graphs for Data Management & Data Science
    Business and Economics Research Data Center https://www.berd-bw.de Baden-Württemberg Wikibase knowledge graphs for data management & data science Dr. Renat Shigapov 23.06.2021 @shigapov @_shigapov DATA Motivation MANAGEMENT 1. people DATA SCIENCE knowledg! 2. processes information linking 3. technology data things KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS 2 DATA Flow MANAGEMENT Definitions DATA Wikidata & Tools SCIENCE Local Wikibase Wikibase Ecosystem Summary KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS 29.10.2012 2030 2021 3 DATA Example: Named Entity Linking SCIENCE https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Entity_Linking_-_Short_Example.png Rule#$as!d problems Machine Learning De!' Learning Learn data science at https://www.kaggle.com 4 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Data_visualization_process_v1.png DATA Example: general MANAGEMENT research data silos data fabric data mesh data space data marketplace data lake data swamp Research data lifecycle https://www.reading.ac.uk/research-services/research-data-management/ 5 https://www.dama.org/cpages/body-of-knowledge about-research-data-management/the-research-data-lifecycle KNOWLEDGE ONTOLOG( + GRAPH = + THINGS https://www.mediawiki.org https://www.wikiba.se ✔ “Things, not strings” by Google, 2012 + ✔ A knowledge graph links things in different datasets https://mariadb.org https://blazegraph.com ✔ A knowledge graph can link people & relational database graph database processes and enhance technologies The main example: “THE KNOWLEDGE GRAPH COOKBOOK RECIPES THAT WORK” by ANDREAS BLUMAUER & HELMUT NAGY, 2020. https://www.wikidata.org
    [Show full text]
  • Wiki-Reliability: a Large Scale Dataset for Content Reliability on Wikipedia
    Wiki-Reliability: A Large Scale Dataset for Content Reliability on Wikipedia KayYen Wong∗ Miriam Redi Diego Saez-Trumper Outreachy Wikimedia Foundation Wikimedia Foundation Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia London, United Kingdom Barcelona, Spain [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia, used by algorithms and web users as a central hub of reliable information on the web. The quality and reliability of Wikipedia content is maintained by a community of volunteer editors. Machine learning and information retrieval algorithms could help scale up editors’ manual efforts around Wikipedia content reliability. However, there is a lack of large-scale data to support the development of such research. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose Wiki-Reliability, the first dataset of English Wikipedia articles annotated with a wide set of content reliability issues. To build this dataset, we rely on Wikipedia “templates”. Tem- plates are tags used by expert Wikipedia editors to indicate con- Figure 1: Example of an English Wikipedia page with several tent issues, such as the presence of “non-neutral point of view” template messages describing reliability issues. or “contradictory articles”, and serve as a strong signal for detect- ing reliability issues in a revision. We select the 10 most popular 1 INTRODUCTION reliability-related templates on Wikipedia, and propose an effective method to label almost 1M samples of Wikipedia article revisions Wikipedia is one the largest and most widely used knowledge as positive or negative with respect to each template. Each posi- repositories in the world. People use Wikipedia for studying, fact tive/negative example in the dataset comes with the full article checking and a wide set of different information needs [11].
    [Show full text]
  • News Release
    NEWS RELEASE For immediate release Sue Gardner to deliver 16th annual LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture Former head of CBC.ca and Wikimedia Foundation to open 6 Degrees Toronto TORONTO, August 13, 2018—6 Degrees announces that the 2018 LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture will be delivered by leading digital pioneer Sue Gardner. The lecture will be given on September 24 as part of 6 Degrees Toronto, a project of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. As senior director of CBC.ca, Gardner reinvented the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s place in the world of digital news. Later, as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, she played a crucial role in the explosive growth of Wikipedia. The San Francisco–based Gardner continues to be a sought-after global thought-leader: she currently advises media and technology companies, and serves on the boards of Privacy International and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. “Sue Gardner is on the forefront of ideas on technology, democracy, and women’s roles in our society,” said ICC Co-founder and Co-chair John Ralston Saul. “As we witness the alarming erosion of democratic institutions, I can’t think of a more relevant voice to address the challenges ahead. I can’t wait to welcome Sue home to Toronto to deliver this year’s LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture.” Titled Dark Times Ahead: Taking Back Truth, Freedom, and Technology, the interactive event will include Gardner in conversation with John Ralston Saul. Gardner joins an illustrious list of past LaFontaine-Baldwin lecturers, including His Highness the Aga Khan, Naomi Klein, Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, Michael Sandel, and Naheed Nenshi.
    [Show full text]
  • Omnipedia: Bridging the Wikipedia Language
    Omnipedia: Bridging the Wikipedia Language Gap Patti Bao*†, Brent Hecht†, Samuel Carton†, Mahmood Quaderi†, Michael Horn†§, Darren Gergle*† *Communication Studies, †Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, §Learning Sciences Northwestern University {patti,brent,sam.carton,quaderi}@u.northwestern.edu, {michael-horn,dgergle}@northwestern.edu ABSTRACT language edition contains its own cultural viewpoints on a We present Omnipedia, a system that allows Wikipedia large number of topics [7, 14, 15, 27]. On the other hand, readers to gain insight from up to 25 language editions of the language barrier serves to silo knowledge [2, 4, 33], Wikipedia simultaneously. Omnipedia highlights the slowing the transfer of less culturally imbued information similarities and differences that exist among Wikipedia between language editions and preventing Wikipedia’s 422 language editions, and makes salient information that is million monthly visitors [12] from accessing most of the unique to each language as well as that which is shared information on the site. more widely. We detail solutions to numerous front-end and algorithmic challenges inherent to providing users with In this paper, we present Omnipedia, a system that attempts a multilingual Wikipedia experience. These include to remedy this situation at a large scale. It reduces the silo visualizing content in a language-neutral way and aligning effect by providing users with structured access in their data in the face of diverse information organization native language to over 7.5 million concepts from up to 25 strategies. We present a study of Omnipedia that language editions of Wikipedia. At the same time, it characterizes how people interact with information using a highlights similarities and differences between each of the multilingual lens.
    [Show full text]
  • Wikipedia Workshop: Learn How to Edit and Create Pages
    Wikipedia Workshop: Learn how to edit and create pages Part A: Your user account Log in with your user name and password. OR If you don’t have a user account already, click on “Create account” in the top right corner. Once you’re logged in, click on “Beta” and enable the VisualEditor. The VisualEditor is the tool for editing or creating articles. It’s like Microsoft Word: it helps you create headings, bold or italicize characters, add hyperlinks, etc.). It’s also possible to add references with the Visual Editor. Pamela Carson, Web Services Librarian, May 12, 2015 Handout based on “Guide d’aide à la contribution sur Wikipédia” by Benoît Rochon. Part B: Write a sentence or two about yourself Click on your username. This will lead you to your user page. The URL will be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:[your user name] Exercise: Click on “Edit source” and write about yourself, then enter a description of your change in the “Edit summary” box and click “Save page”. Pamela Carson, Web Services Librarian, May 12, 2015 Handout based on “Guide d’aide à la contribution sur Wikipédia” by Benoît Rochon. Part C: Edit an existing article To edit a Wikipedia article, click on the tab “Edit” or “Edit source” (for more advanced users) available at the top of any page. These tabs are also available beside any section title within an article. Editing an entire page Editing just a section Need help? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial/Editing Exercise: Go to http://www.statcan.gc.ca/ and find a statistic that interests you.
    [Show full text]
  • The Culture of Wikipedia
    Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia Good Faith Collaboration The Culture of Wikipedia Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. Foreword by Lawrence Lessig The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Web edition, Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. CC-NC-SA 3.0 Purchase at Amazon.com | Barnes and Noble | IndieBound | MIT Press Wikipedia's style of collaborative production has been lauded, lambasted, and satirized. Despite unease over its implications for the character (and quality) of knowledge, Wikipedia has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the centuries-old Author Bio & Research Blog pursuit of a universal encyclopedia. Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a rich ethnographic portrayal of Wikipedia's historical roots, collaborative culture, and much debated legacy. Foreword Preface to the Web Edition Praise for Good Faith Collaboration Preface Extended Table of Contents "Reagle offers a compelling case that Wikipedia's most fascinating and unprecedented aspect isn't the encyclopedia itself — rather, it's the collaborative culture that underpins it: brawling, self-reflexive, funny, serious, and full-tilt committed to the 1. Nazis and Norms project, even if it means setting aside personal differences. Reagle's position as a scholar and a member of the community 2. The Pursuit of the Universal makes him uniquely situated to describe this culture." —Cory Doctorow , Boing Boing Encyclopedia "Reagle provides ample data regarding the everyday practices and cultural norms of the community which collaborates to 3. Good Faith Collaboration produce Wikipedia. His rich research and nuanced appreciation of the complexities of cultural digital media research are 4. The Puzzle of Openness well presented.
    [Show full text]
  • Supporting Organizational Effectiveness Within Movements
    While organizational effectiveness is a common concern with nonprofit organizations and networks, especially ones that are growing, the de-centralized culture of Wikimedia presented some unique challenges and opportunities. In a movement that so strongly valued the autonomy of indi- vidual organizations, what did it mean for the Foundation to Supporting Organizational attempt to increase their effectiveness – and how could it do this in a way that was not top-down? Furthermore, the Effectiveness Within Foundation was concerned that its financial support was fueling momentum toward larger-budget, “traditional” or Movements staffed nonprofit structures which might not be consistent with its history and mission as a global free-knowledge move- A Wikimedia Foundation Case Study ment created and driven largely by individual volunteers. Funders supporting movements face a unique set of chal- The Foundation was grappling with two fundamental lenges when trying to support organizations working questions: for the same cause. In their efforts to increase organi- zational effectiveness, foundations invariably face ques- How could the Wikimedia Foundation help Wikime- dia groups make a clearer connection between their tions of credibility and control, and sometimes encoun- strategies and their desired impacts without being di- ter diverging understandings of success. This case study 1 rective about those strategies and desired impacts? profiles how TCC Group – with its partner, the Wikimedia Foundation – developed an innovative, participatory ap- Anecdotally WMF knew that some chapters were proach to these challenges, resulting in increased orga- “more effective” than others, but without clear cri- nizational effectiveness in the Wikimedia movement. teria for success it was difficult to determine how or why some groups were thriving.
    [Show full text]
  • An Analysis of Contributions to Wikipedia from Tor
    Are anonymity-seekers just like everybody else? An analysis of contributions to Wikipedia from Tor Chau Tran Kaylea Champion Andrea Forte Department of Computer Science & Engineering Department of Communication College of Computing & Informatics New York University University of Washington Drexel University New York, USA Seatle, USA Philadelphia, USA [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Benjamin Mako Hill Rachel Greenstadt Department of Communication Department of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington New York University Seatle, USA New York, USA [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—User-generated content sites routinely block contri- butions from users of privacy-enhancing proxies like Tor because of a perception that proxies are a source of vandalism, spam, and abuse. Although these blocks might be effective, collateral damage in the form of unrealized valuable contributions from anonymity seekers is invisible. One of the largest and most important user-generated content sites, Wikipedia, has attempted to block contributions from Tor users since as early as 2005. We demonstrate that these blocks have been imperfect and that thousands of attempts to edit on Wikipedia through Tor have been successful. We draw upon several data sources and analytical techniques to measure and describe the history of Tor editing on Wikipedia over time and to compare contributions from Tor users to those from other groups of Wikipedia users. Fig. 1. Screenshot of the page a user is shown when they attempt to edit the Our analysis suggests that although Tor users who slip through Wikipedia article on “Privacy” while using Tor. Wikipedia’s ban contribute content that is more likely to be reverted and to revert others, their contributions are otherwise similar in quality to those from other unregistered participants and to the initial contributions of registered users.
    [Show full text]
  • Mathematical Formulae in Wikimedia Projects 2020”
    Preprint from https://www.gipp.com/pub/ M. Schubotz et al. \Mathematical Formulae in Wikimedia Projects 2020". In: Proc. ACM/IEEE JCDL. 2020. doi: 10.1145/3383583. 3398557 Mathematical Formulae in Wikimedia Projects 2020 Moritz Schubotz1,2, Andr´eGreiner-Petter1, Norman Meuschke1,3, Olaf Teschke2, and Bela Gipp1,3 1University of Wuppertal, Germany ([email protected], [email protected]) 2FIZ-Karlsruhe, Germany (ffirst.lastg@fiz-karlsruhe.de) 3University of Konstanz, Germany (ffi[email protected]) May 8, 2020 Abstract This poster summarizes our contributions to Wikimedia's processing pipeline for mathematical formulae. We describe how we have supported the transition from rendering formulae as course-grained PNG images in 2001 to providing modern semantically enriched language-independent MathML formulae in 2020. Additionally, we describe our plans to im- prove the accessibility and discoverability of mathematical knowledge in Wikimedia projects further. 1 Introduction Mathematical formulae are an integral part of Wikipedia and other projects of the Wikimedia foundation1. The MediaWiki software is the technical back- bone of many Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. Since 2003, wikitext { the markup language of MediaWiki { supports mathematical content [9]. For example, MediaWiki converts the wikitext code <math>E=mc^2</math> to the arXiv:2003.09417v2 [cs.DL] 6 May 2020 formula E = mc2. While the markup for mathematical formulae has remained stable since 2003, MediaWikis pipeline for processing wikitext to render formu- lae has changed significantly. Initially, MediaWiki used LaTeX to convert math tags in wikitext to PNG images. The rendering process was slow, the images did not integrate well into the text, were inaccessible to screen readers for visually impaired users, and scaled poorly for both small and high-resolution screens.
    [Show full text]
  • Building a Visual Editor for Wikipedia
    Building a Visual Editor for Wikipedia Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw Wikimania D.C. 2012 (Introduce yourself) (Introduce yourself) We’d like to talk to you about how we’ve been building a visual editor for Wikipedia Trevor Parscal Roan Kattouw Rob Moen Lead Designer and Engineer Data Model Engineer User Interface Engineer Wikimedia Wikimedia Wikimedia Inez Korczynski Christian Williams James Forrester Edit Surface Engineer Edit Surface Engineer Product Analyst Wikia Wikia Wikimedia The People Wikimania D.C. 2012 We are only 2/6ths of the VisualEditor team Our team includes 2 engineers from Wikia - they also use MediaWiki They also fight crime in their of time Parsoid Team Gabriel Wicke Subbu Sastry Lead Parser Engineer Parser Engineer Wikimedia Wikimedia The People Wikimania D.C. 2012 There’s also two remote people working on a new parser This parser makes what we are doing with the VisualEditor possible The Project Wikimania D.C. 2012 You might recognize this, it’s a Wikipedia article You should edit it! Seems simple enough, just hit the edit button and be on your way... The Complexity Problem Wikimania D.C. 2012 Or not... What is all this nonsense you may ask? Well, it’s called Wikitext! Even really smart people who have a lot to contribute to Wikipedia find it confusing The truth is, Wikitext is a lousy IQ test, and it’s holding Wikipedia back, severely Active Editors 20k 0 2001 2007 Today Growth Stagnation The Complexity Problem Wikimania D.C. 2012 The internet has normal people on it now, not just geeks and weirdoes Normal people like simple things, and simple things are growing fast We must make editing Wikipedia easier to use, not just to grow, but even just to stay alive The Complexity Problem Wikimania D.C.
    [Show full text]