# MediaWiki/Introduction

Welcome to the Wikiversity content development project for MediaWiki. MediaWiki is a wiki software package licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is written in PHP and requires the MySQL relational database management system (although it has some PostgreSQL support). Historically, MediaWiki was developed to serve the needs of Wikipedia, a free wiki-based encyclopedia, but it has since become one of the most popular general wiki solutions. Today, it is used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and many other popular and large wikis. It has also been deployed by companies as an internal knowledge management solution, and as a content management system. Notably, Novell uses it to operate several of its high traffic websites, which are not editable by the general public.

## Active participants

The histories of Wikiversity pages indicate who the active participants are. If you are an active editor for MediaWiki-related pages, you can list your name here (this can help the community of MediaWiki editors grow and help these editors communicate better).

## School news

* August 16, 2006 - School founded!
* November 1, 2006 - Wiki 101 expanded to sit between Introduction to Wiki and Topic:MediaWiki
* February 23, 2007 - Topic:Scripting MediaWiki started
* March 15, 2007 - Summer of Code 2007 - list of project ideas
* February 9 2011 - Coalition of the Willing -> Wikiversity camp
* November 9, 2023 - WikimediaCourse Launched - a tuition-based credit-bearing university course offered by SUNY Polytechnic Institute

## Lessons

Get to work writing lessons! Simply make a link to the name of the lesson (lessons are independent pages) and start writing!
* Introduction to Wiki - for new Wikiversity editors
* Learning project: Wiki 101 - a guide that draws upon the MediaWiki Handbook for advancing Wikiversity editors
* Wikipedia service-learning courses explores several features and policies of Mediawiki projects
* Wikiversity:Templates - A Guide to creating, perfecting, deploying and documenting templates used at Wikiversity.
* Generating dynamic content with MediaWiki - A look at MediaWiki dynamics using Help:Variables, ParserFunctions and other dynamic elements in MediaWiki.
* creating a new MediaWiki variable - mw:manual:variable#Example

## Research projects

This feature of Wikiversity will be implemented later pending further discussion.
* MediaWiki Project - guides participants from introductory HTML to advanced MediaWiki hacking.... participants develop new MediaWiki features for the Wikiversity community
* Proposed Learning project: Citing Sources - Introduction to finding high quality, verifiable sources and citing them in WikiMedia projects.
* Proposed Learning project: Wikimedia Garbage Detail - Wikiversity's sister projects such as Wikipedia discard articles that do not conform to the narrow mission of the various Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia Garbage Detail will be a Wikiversity project devoted to learning how to efficiently capture discarded content from other Wikimedia projects that is suitable for Wikiversity.
* Topic:MediaWiki/Codebase: an ongoing investigation of the Mediawiki codebase designed to be a Wikiversity convergence of School:Computer Science and Meta's old How to become a MediaWiki hacker.
* Topic:MediaWiki/Engine: an exploration of how MediaWiki uses PHP to access and modify records in its MySQL database. See also Topic:Databases and Topic:Object-relational databases

### Diagrams

Some participants studying Computer Science are contemplating using MediaWiki as a subject for a study in UML (Unified Modeling Language) producing a set of UML diagrams that may help to visualize how the MediaWiki backend works. - Discuss

## Resources

Know any good resources for scholars of this topic? Add them here!
* First thing first: You cannot hack without a wiki! mw:manual:installation
** mw:wiki on a stick (- step-by-step guide (for windows) to setting up a small (< 50Mb) wiki, which can sit on your USB drive, a good way to start hacking
*** It is very convenient to install the wos on windows, which comes with mediawiki, and also other options like moodle, joomla, wordpress, and a lot more.
Hacking start points (How to become a MediaWiki hacker [- useful but a little too vague for beginners])
* Developer Hub at MediaWiki.org
* b:MediaWiki Developer's Handbook
* Subversion index and files, online (ViewVC)
* Generated documentation, online
* MediaWiki files, SourceForge
* send2wiki.com convert external HTML pages and PDFs to MediaWiki pages
* mw:manual:varaible - information on variables and hooks
* ...add a link...

### Extending MediaWiki

* Semantic MediaWiki (see also this list of Semantic wiki projects
* liquidThreads - Extension:liquidThreads