Help talk:Installation-Software Configuration
Could someone flesh out the "Links: no help pages" section for the benefit of people setting up MediaWiki for the first time? A sort of "Linking back to the Help for Dummies" type guide would be handy. --Barrykas 02:22, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to second this--the links given tell a MediaWiki novice absolutely nothing useful about how to get his/her local help working without a bunch of trial and error. I just want something up & working I can play with. This is like handing someone who's looking for a steaknife a pile of iron ore and some coal.
How do I actually get local help working?[edit]
Nothing here actually seems to give any idea what needs to be done.
Comprehensive List of Help Articles[edit]
Does this exists? I'm aware that you need to manually export the help files you want and then update the links appropriately, but has anyone documented an attempt at this? Please help.
Coffeyman11 22:46, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
Need step by step[edit]
OK, I've been working on trying to get help working for most of a day. I've use the "AllPages" to grab the Help namespace, and then manually exported a bunch of other templates, categories, etc. I still have broken pages and links all over the place.
I've come to the conclusion that while it MAY be technically possible to install help pages, it's not feasible / realistic to do in practice due to the lack of a facility for a comprehensive dump, and associated documentation on that procedure. So I am looking at somehow using inter-wiki linking for help pages, but there is no documentation on that either.
This serious situation needs a champion who really understands the system and documentation. Wreed 21:21, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
- I'm not an export and I don't really have time to make a step by step instructions but here is some info. See Help:Guide for system administrators for setting up interwiki linking. You have to add some records to the interwiki table in your wiki's database. To do this you have to use a SQL client and connect to your database. (See the linked guide for help with that.) I used the following SQL statement on my wiki.
INSERT INTO interwiki (iw_prefix,iw_url,iw_local) VALUES
('w','http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1',1),
('m','http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1',1),
('meta','http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1',1),
('mw','http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/$1',1);
- Now I can interwiki link to help documents like so, [[m:Help:Contents]] and [[mw:Help:Contents]]
Going unheard[edit]
I would like to add my support for a comprehensive HOWTO for Dummies. A quick and dirty get something running (linking to the meta site?) so that when an new installation goes live there is at least something interesting when a new user clicks the Help:Editing or Help:Contents buttons. Then the admins will have some breathing room to customizes the pages (considering the number of current manual pages are likely in the hundreds) having all pages exported and imported to your own MediaWiki installation would be ludicrous. Please Help!!!!
- -- Sukima 09:46, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
- I'm not part of the project but it looks like this is being worked on. See mw:Project:PD help --Montecore 02:57, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
Local vs Mediawiki images[edit]
I notices that my local MediaWiki:Common.css (and skins as well) include images from Wikimedia, such as
- http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif/15px-Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif
Should administrators copy such images locally and change the URL's in these CSS files (or better yet, can an install script do this) rather than having all MediaWiki installations repeatedly accessing MediaWiki servers for images? Such local pages will break if there is a MediaWiki or local network outage.
--DavidBiesack 18:19, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
I just noticed this as well on local MediaWiki installations. Disturbingly it came up in a tracking audit; this undocumented "feature" has all the markings of an image beacon and is a privacy concern as most browsers will send the URL of the page loading the image, along with the IP of the requester (with IPv6 especially this is effectively a personal identifier) to a WikiMedia server. Would be great to get an official WikiMedia statement on the use of this tracking mechanism and steps to deactivate it and any similar features on new installs. Note that it does NOT respect "$wgUseInstantCommons = false" which starts to push it toward malicious territory, even if this was not intended.