MediaWiki: Wikipedia and Beyond
Reviewed by Robert Pritchett
Author: Daniel J
Barrett
O'Reilly
Released: October
2008
Pages: 374
$40 USD
ISBN 10: 0-596-51979-6
ISBN 13: 9780596519797
Requirements: Some
knowledge of PHP programming.
Strengths: This is
how Wikipedia became successful – using the MediaWiki PHP foundation.
Weaknesses: None
found.
MediaWiki
Sites using MediaWiki |
|
Introduction
MediaWiki is the world's
most popular wiki platform, the software that runs Wikipedia and thousands of
other websites. Though it appears simple to use at first glance, MediaWiki has
extraordinarily powerful and deep capabilities for managing and organizing
knowledge. In corporate environments, MediaWiki can transform the way teams
write and collaborate.
This comprehensive book
covers MediaWiki's rich (and sometimes subtle) features, helping you become a
wiki expert in no time. You'll learn how to:
- Find your way around by
effective searching and browsing
- Create and edit articles,
categories, and user preferences
- Use advanced features for
authors, such as templates, dynamic lists, logical parser functions, and RSS,
to organize and maintain large numbers of articles
- Install and run your own
wiki, and configure its look and behavior
- Develop custom wiki
features, called extensions, with the PHP programming language and MySQL
database
This
book also provides special guidance for creating successful corporate wikis.
For beginners who want to create or work on collaborative, community-driven
websites with this platform, MediaWiki is the essential one-stop guide.
What I learned
What is a wiki?
"A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who
accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup
language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites." (Wikipedia.org)
I administer/direct the Pure
Energy Systems Wiki site (the community-built resource that focuses on
alternative, clean, practical, renewable energy solutions) and we use
MediaWiki as our platform. I use MediaWiki on a daily basis, so when I was
challenged to improve the look and feel of the site, I figured I'd better know
something about the foundation on which the site is based. http://www.peswiki.com
Because we went 3rd-party
to update the server-side software for the site and perhaps a few thousand
dollars were exchanged (I'm guessing, based on the hourly rate of the
"consultant" provided by the host), the process was perhaps more
painful and time-consuming than it otherwise needed to have been.
MediaWiki is obviously PHP-based
and is used by thousands of site managers. For me, it has been "baptism by
fire", since I became accustomed to using Joomla, and Dreamweaver in
managing and developing websites. Imagine my surprise, that after all that
effort, I could have referenced this book in my dealings with PESWiki.com
– but it was published much later than when I started. Much of what I
"learned by doing", can be found in this book, but it goes much
further than I thought possible.
Wikipedia has a $6 million
annual budget for developing and using MediaWiki. PESWiki is modeled after that
format. Wikipedia has millions upon millions of page views. Since I started
working on PESWiki, it has gone from around 1,000 page views per day up to 25
million page views per month and it is growing. It is finally going viral,
after having been the vision of Sterling Allan many years ago (but it is still
his baby). As of this writing, there are 4, 170 registered users and 15, 980
pages in the database. It keeps me "very busy".
We've tried using private wikis
with macCompanion in the past, but I
was put-off by the esoteric effort necessary to "collaborate" and we
terminated those. You get used to doing things a certain way and it is
difficult to break out of that shell. Wikis are not for "everyone".
It does one thing and does it well – Online collaboration and information
dissemination.
The book has shown me how to do
something previously thought "impossible" to do – forms and
dynamic pages. I can also
experiment with all kinds of extensions, so I do not need to be reinventing the
wheel – or if I wish, I can devote time and effort to creating my own PHP
extensions for PESWiki. As it is, PESWiki will continue to morph, as I get a
better handle on the technology. There are still a lot of things we want to
accomplish.
As you may have guessed, I've
dog-eared the heck out of this book – which makes it a keeper.
Conclusion
This book saves me time. I wish
I had been able to read it sooner, rather than later. If you have been tasked
with creating a wiki for your corporation or enterprise, why not try this
PHP-based application? Who knows, perhaps you could be the proud owner of the
next "Wikipedia"!
Now if we could just get some of
that $6 million annual budget Wikipedia is using…
