MediaWiki book report

Mediawiki, published by O’Reilly Media is a wonderful book to read if you are just starting out and learning how to use the Mediawiki software. In my opinion, it doesn’t seem to help a lot for the more advanced users who already know how to set up a basic wiki. The book covers three main topics. The first part is a general overview of what wikis are, and how to use one. The second is a more in depth reading on how to edit articles, organize pages and use templates. It’s basically more code centered than the last part. The final section is for people who want to make their own wiki, or be the administrator. It talks about installing the wiki on your website, doing maintenance and bug fixes, and overall controlling users and group.

I know a fair bit about wikis since I am active in one for a game I play, but I still have been able to find this book real handy. A lot of the editing basics and template usage has been memorized, but some of the things not used often like transcluded pages, using short urls, and editing the overall layout of the wiki so it is not default, tend to be for non basic users and the book acts as a quick reference guide with an organized table of contents. The weak points behind the book however are its lack of thorough details when describing how to do some things. For instance, under the index, under ‘Bots’, there’s a page that it says is “Creating a Bot”, but on the page it is only a brief 2 short paragraphs that talk about what the API is and it gives you a link to a site that talks about how they work but it never explains the step by step guide on how to make one. It also talks about some extensions (Parserfunctions, and DPL) which are really handy for a wiki. Although, it doesn’t explain that these aren’t part of the package that you download so you have to download them separately. All in all, the book explains the basic to semi-basic features pretty thoroughly, but is a little lacking when explaining something more advanced. It is to be expected since the book doesn’t have a big bunch of pages that it could have had.

One of the strong points of this Mediawiki book is that it doesn’t just give you a few numbered steps saying, “Do this, then do that, then do this and it should work.” The book explains what some features are, gives you examples and shows you what the result will be. It teaches you the background to editing something so you know how it works vs. how to just implement something knowing nothing about it. After reading this book, I feel like it would be beneficial, if you’re going to continue using mediawiki, to look at other more in depth books about Mediawiki and Wikis in general. Hopefully they might explain some of the things that this book has lacked.