indeed learning curve i am amazed at how much learning i had to do in order to get the wiki privatized and fully operational first off i wanted to make an iron clad security main page like arbcom s wiki that wasn t too terribly difficult but there is a gaping hole in mediawiki s security in the default installation whereby all uploaded files generally images in a completely private wiki can be directly accessed by anyone familiar with mediawiki merely typing a url path that took some reading and trial error mediawiki s excuse is that mediawiki is designed to be open to everyone maaaan it s like about openness the thing is those who don t care to think about security wouldn t mind if images cannot be viewed via intelligent url typing however those making a private wiki who do care wouldn t want them viewable by i p s and then thumbnails of images wouldn t work no matter what i did to localsettings php file like many things i would go to talk pages on mediawiki and discover there have been many others wrestling with the same issues it turned out that imagemagick has been omitted from recent builds of mediawiki moreover installing imagemagick isn t a matter of dropping files and folders into the wiki using ftp it s a linux installer rpm and only the webmaster can do that and after all that is done there are bunch of gotta have templates like template xt template template doc template hilite template nbhyph template nowrap and template xt i think i have all the gotta haves now i was the shepherding author sponsor on a bunch of them so i m fond of them i can t complain about free stuff mediawiki is an amazing product that few commercial interests could match for under i ll take the poor documentation associated with open source software any day