YK: 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.

WMF

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 where a software application becomes extremely successful despite being, at heart, a byproduct of another project. (Though it’s not a unique situation — the bug-tracking software Bugzilla has a similar status, and there are probably others.)

Semantic MediaWiki

There are some things that do make MediaWiki unique, and in my opinion the most important one is the extension called Semantic MediaWiki. Using Semantic MediaWiki, you can store the wiki’s text as data, and then query that data elsewhere, both in the wiki and outside. But beyond that, it provides an entire framework for structuring data that makes MediaWiki not just a more powerful tool, but, in my opinion, helps to make it the most powerful, flexible knowledge-management tool on the market. This book covers SMW, and its related extensions, to a great extent.

Author's involvment

I first got involved with MediaWiki in 2006, as a direct result of having discovered Semantic MediaWiki. Since then I’ve devoted my career to improving the workings of SMW and MediaWiki in general, and to helping companies, organizations and communities make use of the technology. Around 10 of the extensions covered here, out of over 60 mentioned in the book, were created by me, most notably the Semantic Forms extension, which gets its own chapter; so I could be accused of using this book to market my own technology.

To that I would respond that this book represents my view of the best ways to use MediaWiki; I created those extensions because I thought they were features that were missing. Years of working with clients have helped to solidify my views on the most useful configurations. And, hey, it’s my book — any author writing such a book is bound to favor the tools that have worked for them.

Usefulness of this book

This book will be useful to some extent to average users of MediaWiki-based wikis — Wikipedia and many others — especially the early chapters on MediaWiki syntax and structure. However, the primary intended audience is for administrators: people who are running, or helping to run, or thinking about running, an instance of MediaWiki, and could benefit from a general reference guide.

The book is called "Working with MediaWiki", because it’s meant for people who are trying to do real work with MediaWiki — whether it’s for their company, for an organization, for a user community, or for themselves. Wherever possible, I try to offer a pragmatic approach, and straightforward answers to the common issues that people experience.