Working With MediaWiki

the previous discussion.
    The LiquidThreadsextension, in its own way, gets around all these problems. It provides for structured, threaded discussions on each talk page. Figure 6.1 shows how an empty talk page looks if the LiquidThreads extension (also known as "LQT") has been installed.
    Figure 6.1 LiquidThreads interface
    Using LiquidThreads, any user can start a new thread with any title, or respond to any specific comment that’s already been made. And users can edit their own comments, but not anyone else’s.
    With LiquidThreads, users get notified about new messages on talk pages they’re watching (see here for an explanation of watching pages) via a link at the top of every page, which reads “My new messages”, then the number of new messages that have appeared on all of those talk pages.
    It’s a setup that some people really like, while others prefer the simplicity of standard wiki-style commenting.
    If you’re considering using LiquidThreads, you should take into account the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation, which is responsible for the design and development of that extension, is currently putting only minimal resources into maintaining it; so while it currently works fine for all recent versions of MediaWiki, there’s no guarantee that it will keep working in the future.

Emailing users
    The page Special:EmailUser lets any user with a confirmed email address email any other user on the wiki with a confirmed email address. The user can set anything for the email’s subject and body. The email that is sent will have the sender’s username and email address appear as the “From” in the email, so you shouldn’t use this page if you want to hide your email address from the recipient.
    MediaWiki does not offer a way for administrators to email all of the wiki’s users at once. There is an extension that does this, “STGS MassMailer”, but it is currently insecure.
    There are several extensions that allow the wiki to have a contact form, where users can enter comments that will then be emailed to one or more administrators. You can see the full set here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Contact_form_extensions

Uploading
    The standard interface for uploading files to MediaWiki is the page Special:Upload, which lets you upload one file at a time.
    Figure 7.1 Special:Upload page
    When you upload a file, you are asked to select its name on the wiki, which, by default, is the file’s name on the local system. You can also provide a summary of the file, and finally you are asked to specify a copyright type for that file, based on the set of allowed copyrights for the wiki (more on this later). The copyright choice assumes that the person doing the uploading was responsible for generating the file; or, at the very least, knows the copyright wishes of the person who generated the file — and often, neither of these is the case. This book will not get into issues of copyright, legal or otherwise; but you should know that there are a lot of options for allowed copyright type, and the best solution may depend on a variety of circumstances, including whether the wiki is public or private.
    Once a file is uploaded, several things happen: the file gets placed in the wiki’s /images directory (the directory is called “images”, even though it can hold uploaded files of all types); a page in the “File:” namespace is created for that file (the full name of the page will be “File: page-name ”, like “File:Cat.png”); and, if it’s an image, and the image is bigger than the standard thumbnail size, a thumbnail is created for that file and is placed in the directory
/images/thumb
.
The /images directory
    The
/images
directory can take two structures. By default, the directory is subdivided into two levels of subdirectories, where the first level consists of folders whose name is a single hexadecimal digit, from “0” to “f”; and the second level has folder names whose name consists of the parent folder’s number or letter, plus a second hexadecimal digit. In other words, a file can be placed in a directory like “
/images/8/8b
” within the MediaWiki directory. There are 16 * 16 = 256 such possible sub-subdirectories. This default approach is also known as the “hashed” approach. It is used to try to prevent directories from getting too large — some file systems have a limit on the number of files any one directory can contain.
    The other approach is to simply store