YK: Community and support

Community and support

There’s a strong community of users and developers around MediaWiki, who can provide support. The best ways to get support are the mailing list, the IRC channel, and on the MediaWiki website at mediawiki.org.

There are a large number of mailing lists for MediaWiki (15, at last count). Only two are important, though, for average MediaWiki users:

   mediawiki-l — the main mailing list for questions about MediaWiki and most of its extensions.

   wikitech-l — discussions about the use of MediaWiki on Wikimedia sites, as well as topics related to MediaWiki development.

You can see information on these two mailing lists (like how to subscribe), as well as on the other mailing lists, here

   https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mailing_lists 

Support is also always available at the MediaWiki IRC channel, #mediawiki, via freenode.net. There are other IRC channels, though they’re not nearly as useful. You can see a full listing here:

   https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/IRC 

You can also get support at mediawiki.org. To ask questions about core MediaWiki, you can go here:

   https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Support 

And for any specific extension, you can use its talk page on mediawiki.org to get support.

Many open source software applications also have their own user and developer conferences. MediaWiki doesn’t exactly have such a thing, but there are various MediaWiki-focused “hackathons” each year, and there is also Wikimania, an annual conference on everything Wikimedia-related. In practice, Wikimania is mostly focused on Wikipedia, but MediaWiki does get significant attention. And Wikimania is a great way to meet the people behind the software.

The mediawiki.org “Events” page shows a constantly-updated list of MediaWiki-related events and hackathons around the world:

   https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events 

If you think you’ve found a bug in MediaWiki or one of its extensions, or you’ve created a software patch and want to submit it, the best way to do that is at the MediaWiki bug tracker (which uses the software Bugzilla), here:

   https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org 

Often, using Bugzilla is the best way to make feature requests as well.

Finally, there are various ways to get paid support, either from individuals or from consulting companies. The most definitive list of both individuals and companies doing MediaWiki consulting is here:

   https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Professional_development_and_consulting 

It would be odd not to mention my own company here — WikiWorks (http://wikiworks.com). We may be the most explicitly MediaWiki-focused consulting company at this point, though we’re far from the only that provides such services.