Viraj's Weblog

With how easy it is to install things on Debian, I decided to check out Mediawiki, the wiki used for the large encyclopedia site Wikipedia.

It required PHP 4.1.2 or higher, and MySQL 3.2 or higher. The Debian package notes for libapache2-mod-php4 stated that the package only works with Apache's prefork MPM. I had earlier installed Apache 2 with its threading MPM (apache2-mpm-worker) to play with mod_python. PHP is not thread-safe, so requires the MPM preforking model (apache2-mpm-prefork). I selected that package, expecting some problems 'converting' to the different Apache MPM, but it ran flawlessly. Then selected the libapache2-mod-php4 package, which brought in all the needed requirements. Man, I remember when I had to use Apache Toolbox to get everything working properly. Debian packages are a huge timesaver.

Anyhow, there was no Mediawiki Debian package, so grabbed the tar and went through the install. These days, PHP projects are coming with their own PHP web-based installation. That's nice for installing on webhosting providers that don't give you shell access. Within a few minutes I had Mediawiki running on my system.

It's a very nice wiki, storing most data in the database. I liked how simple it was, and it had a very usable markup toolbar when editing pages. This would help alot for new users. I know that it is scalable from the massive Wikipedia site.

My major gripe with it is how it stores attachments. It seems the only attachments Mediawiki expects are images. This can be changed by allowing different extensions, but why the concentration on images only? More importantly, there is one namespace for all filenames. So you cannot have 2 wiki pages with the files meeting.doc on both of them. The 2nd upload would overwrite the first one. This makes uploading attachments rather unusable in my opinion. Contrasting with Twiki, which stores the attachments in a separate namespace for each wiki page.

Because of the above, I feel Twiki is still the best wiki out there.