Working With MediaWiki

Acknowledgments
    I would like to thank the following people, who provided helpful advice and criticism during the writing of this book: Mike Cariaso, Jeroen De Dauw, Ike Hecht, Kristen Hunt, Max Klein, Markus Krötzsch, Niklas Laxström, Chris Mills and Jeremie Patonnier.
    This is a book about MediaWiki, so it wouldn’t exist without the software, and all of the people who have helped to develop it. In a sense, they created this book — I just had to write it all down. A big thanks to all the developers, designers and testers of MediaWiki and the extensions described here. It would be unwieldy to try to list everyone, but you know who you are.
    This book consists of original content, except for the chapter on Semantic Forms, much of which was copied from the Semantic Forms documentation on mediawiki.org. That documentation was mostly written by me, though other people contributed to it as well (it’s a wiki); so a specific thank you to everyone whose edits to those pages have shown up in this book.
    I have run the MediaWiki consulting company WikiWorks since 2009, and my experience gained in that company has informed a lot of this book. I would like to thank all the WikiWorks consultants, past and present, who have done the challenging work of implementing all this software and seeing what works and what doesn’t (often through a lot of trial-and-error), and figuring out the best ways to use all the technologies together. This book occasionally uses the terms “we” and “our” — that’s not a literary conceit, but rather an indication that the views here represent, to some extent, the collective opinion of WikiWorks. I would also like to thank the clients of WikiWorks over the years, for constantly clarifying what’s important and what’s less important to the real users of MediaWiki; and of course, for keeping us in business.
    I would like to thank two organizations in particular, one a nonprofit organization and one a wildly profitable company: the Wikimedia Foundation and Google. They have both been instrumental in my involvement in, and continued benefit from, MediaWiki. It happens that, over the years, both have served all the following roles: reference source, software utility provider, sponsor of development, and client. These have been two tremendously valuable organizations, to me and to hundreds of millions of others, and I could never thank them enough for their contributions.
    I would also like to thank the software development company 37signals, not for their software, but for the philosophy of development that they’ve popularized, which I would summarize as: software should have an opinion, which is reflected as much in what’s not included as in what is . That philosophy has been helpful in my MediaWiki development process, and it has been a guide to some extent in the creation of this book as well.
    I would like to thank the book’s cover designer, Grace Cheong, for creating an excellent book cover.
    Finally, I would like to thank my lovely wife Lee, for her invaluable edits and for providing support and encouragement for the book every step of the way.

Introduction
    "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" was a 1961 Broadway musical, and a 1952 book (thanks, Wikipedia), that parodied corporate life. But the phrase could just as well serve as a description of MediaWiki’s history. MediaWiki is best known as the software that powers Wikipedia; but it is also among the most popular, if not the most popular, application for internal, corporate wikis. And on public wikis, the wikis whose name often ends in "pedia" or starts or ends with "wiki", MediaWiki is unquestionably #1.
    But the interesting thing is that all this happened without any real involvement from MediaWiki’s creators. MediaWiki is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, and developed by a large group of programmers around the world, many of whom work for the Wikimedia Foundation. And, as far as the development of MediaWiki is concerned, the main goal of the WMF, and most of the developers, is to create a stable platform that Wikipedia, and the WMF’s other sites like Wiktionary and Wikiversity, can run on. MediaWiki’s developers generally do take the idea of MediaWiki as a standalone application seriously, but at the same time, most (though not all) of MediaWiki’s developers see that as a secondary issue, with the primary issue remaining improving Wikipedia. So, with MediaWiki, we have the rare situation