MediaWiki Introduction
Introduction
A wiki is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and
otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for
registration.
Wikipedia is a wiki.
MediaWiki is a software that can be used to construct a wiki website. MediaWiki is
licensed under the GNU General Public License. MediaWiki is written in PHP and uses either
the MySQL or PostgreSQL database. MediaWiki was first developed for Wikipedia, but it has
become a popular wiki solution. Today, it is used by several popular and large wikis.
Wikibooks is a wiki, which contains a collection of open content textbooks.
The Global Text Project is a project to create open content electronic textbooks that will
be freely available to the world. The Global Text Project was proposed by Dr. Richard
Watson, at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business. The project has two books
a “Business Fundamentals” (without any content) and an “Information Systems” (with an
outline and some brief paragraphs) ongoing. Currently, the project is using MediaWiki as the
infrastructure software. The project also proposed to modify the existing wiki software, such
as MediaWiki, to support the book editing process better.
About MediaWiki
Features
1) Roles: MediaWiki classifies users into three roles:
User: Although controlled by a combination of privileges, a user basically can read and
write, i.e, a user can be both a reader and an editor.
Moderator: A moderator can delete a page, merge page histories, and perform other
tasks that require higher privileges than read and write.
Administrator: An administrator can install, maintain, backup, and change the system
settings.
2) Content organization
The content is organized as WebPages. The WebPages are linked to each other using
hyperlinks.
3) Writing
The inputs are always ASCII characters. The special characters/formats are represented
by tags in a Wikitext format (the mechanism is similar as the HTML format). A comprehensive
formatting explanation can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing. Some of
the examples are:
 Page 1
Figure 1. Wikitext format
4) Changing/tracing
In general, MediaWiki does not provide comprehensive access control. Any user can
modify a page if the page is not locked. The user can also provide a summary of the changes
if he wants.
Figure 2. Editing page
 Page 2
The system keeps a copy of every version of the updated pages (identified by time and
username). A user can compare the differences between versions. A user can also modify a
page based on a previous version. However, the editing history is not as powerful as Word’s
“tracking change” function.
Figure 3. History page
Figure 4. Comparing Pages
 Page 3
The moderator can merge editing histories. It is also possible (difficult though) to split the
merged editing history.
Limitations
1) MediaWiki's basic structural unit is a page, whereas books are usually written in
chapters and sections.
2) In MediaWiki's design, anyone can modify a page. While in book editing, different
people may focus on different chapters.
It is possible to add access control to MediaWiki, but it requires programming or installing
third party customization packages.
Installation
Installing MediaWiki requires
1) Apache
2) PHP
3) MySql or Postgres
There are detailed documents available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Installation
For Student Users in the Class
The students will work as “users” in the two Wiki book writing project. After the MediaWiki
is installed, we will provide more detailed introductions to the students on how to use the
system.
 Page 4