Best and Cheap MediaWiki 1.37.1 Hosting

What is MediaWiki?

MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day.

A Wiki is a web application that allows users to create and edit web page content using a web browser. The term wiki also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website. Mediawiki is a wiki software package licensed under the GNU General Public License, making it free and open source software. This Mediawiki software is used to run the popular web encyclopaedia Wikipedia, besides all projects of Wikimedia, wikis hosted by Wikia, and many other wikis.

MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation that uses PHP to process and display data stored in a database, such as MySQL.

Pages use MediaWiki’s wikitext format, so that users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit them easily.

When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the filesystem. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software.

Why Use a Wiki?

Many organizations find it difficult to properly transfer information from one resource to another. It is also problematic to figure out how to keep valuable information current. Wikis can be the answer to those questions.

Simple Source of Information

Wikis are useful to organizations because they are very easy to set up and maintain. And when a wiki is set up, editing it is even easier. They turn into valuable sources of information for everyone in the organization.

Say a couple has some internal information they want every employee to know about. Or they want to catalogue a history of the organization’s various departments.

A wiki would be the perfect place to store, maintain and update this information. When people need more information, they are just directed to the wiki!

Better Accuracy

One of the major issues for companies is that information printed out at the start of the year can become irrelevant a few months later. Instead of constantly needing to print out new versions of documents, or send out updated PDFs, everything can be done through the wiki.

When an employee needs specific information, they will know the wiki is providing them with the most accurate version of the information they are seeking.

Accepting Change

Some organizations find the concept of a wiki scary. In the past, organizations were structured around keeping information behind closely guarded; the fewer people that had all the information, the better. But the world has changed a lot. The economy has changed and the way companies do business is different.

It is better to have information available to everyone in the company. And when companies are open in this manner, the type of information they collect improves.

When an employee reads a particular wiki page, they may have knowledge that can be used to add to or improve on what is written on that page. When such collaboration takes place, companies can only benefit.

Major and important organizations around the world are embracing wikis. The intelligence staff in the United States have three distinct wikis that run on separate networks. These wikis are used to share information and other data among intelligence officials.

If the intelligence community can embrace wikis, there is very little excuse for other organizations. The era for trying to keep information a secret is over. The world is in an era when sharing information among those who need to know it is helpful.

And it is not as if organization wikis are available to anyone. They are a closed environment where only employees have access. They are safe, useful and easy to maintain databases of information.

New features

• New wikipage.indicator hook for JavaScript (change 721324).
• MediaWiki now has limited support for JPEG2000 files.

Action API changes

• (T280806) The API methods for fetching tokens which were deprecated in MediaWiki 1.24 have been removed. action=query&meta=tokens&type= should be used instead. Please note, some token types no longer exist, and you should just use type=csrf for those instead.
  • action=query&prop=info&intoken -> action=query&meta=tokens&type=csrf
  • action=tokens&type= -> action=query&meta=tokens&type=
  • action=query&list=recentchanges&rctoken -> action=query&meta=tokens&type=csrf
  • action=query&prop=revisions&rvtoken=rollback -> action=query&meta=tokens&type=rollback
  • action=query&meta=userinfo&uiprop=preferencestoken -> action=query&meta=tokens&type=csrf
  • action=query&list=users&ustoken=userrights -> action=query&meta=tokens&type=userrights

Configuration changes

• (T242768) The PasswordCannotMatchUsername password policy has been removed, please use PasswordCannotBeSubstringInUsername instead. If you have not customized your password policies, there will be nothing to do here.

New configuration

• $wgBrowserFormatDetection – This setting allows the enabling or disabling of automatic detection of possible phone numbers in a webpage in iOS Safari.
• $wgParserEnableLegacyMediaDOM – This setting defaults to true, and enables the legacy media HTML structure in the output from the Parser. The alternative modern HTML structure for media is described at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsing/Media_structure. In a future release of MediaWiki, this option will default to false, so it’s a good idea to test this setting on your wiki early and report any issues.

Changed configuration

• $wgContentHandlerTextFallback – This migration setting, which defines how to react if a plain text version of a non-text Content object is requested using ContentHandler::getContentText(), is deprecated.
• $wgActions – This setting lets sysadmins override which actions can be used. It has been re-worked to support injecting dependencies into Action sub-classes as part of wider work on dependency injection. Previously, $wgActions was an array where the keys were the names of actions, and the values had the following impacts (for a given key ‘Foo’):
  • `true`: use the class ‘FooAction’ unless for a specific page WikiPage::getActionOverrides() wants to override that action
  • a string: use the class with that name, and do not allow over-riding on a per-page basis
  • `false`: the action is disabled
  • a callable: use the Action instance returned by invoking that callback, and do not allow overriding on a per-page basis
  • an object: use that specific Action instance, and do not allow overriding on a per-page basis.

As part of T253078, values can now be arrays that are not callables, which are treated as ObjectFactory specs, allowing for services to be injected. Additionally, the distinction between values that allow per-page overrides and those that do not be removed – all actions can now be overridden on a per-page basis using WikiPage::getActionOverrides().

• $wgShellboxUrl – This setting, new in 1.36 to configure the novel Shellbox encapsulation system, is now deprecated; use $wgShellboxUrls as a mapping of service => URL instead.
• $wgIncludejQueryMigrate – This setting, introduced in 1.29 to on whether to provide a migration layer for jQuery, has now switched its default value from true to false. This may break gadgets that depended on methods that were removed in jQuery 3 in 2017. See T280944 for more information.
• A number of settings have been renamed. The former configuration variable names are deprecated, but will be used as the fallback if they are still set, and remain temporarily available for extensions which might try to read them:
  • $wgFileBlacklist is now $wgProhibitedFileExtensions
  • $wgMimeTypeBlacklist is now $wgMimeTypeExclusions
  • $wgEnableUserEmailBlacklist is now $wgEnableUserEmailMuteList
  • $wgShortPagesNamespaceBlacklist is now $wgShortPagesNamespaceExclusions
  • $wgMimeTypeExclusions – As well as being renamed, this configuration array now also prohibits the RFC 4329 form of JavaScript, ‘application/javascript’, as well as previous MIME types.
• $wgFragmentMode – This setting, which determines the encoding of section IDs, has now switched its default value from legacy-first to html5-first: both the HTML5 anchor and the legacy percent-encoding-style anchor will still be generated for section titles, but references to them will use the HTML5 version, resulting in human-readable fragments.

Removed configuration

• $wgLegacyJavaScriptGlobals, deprecated in 1.36.
• (T274695) $wgAjaxEditStash, deprecated in 1.36.
• $wgShowDBErrorBacktrace, deprecated and non-functional since 1.32.
• $wgShowSQLErrors, deprecated and non-functional since 1.32.
• $wgLangObjCacheSize, without deprecation; the LanguageFactory service now always retains at most 10 objects in its LRU-cache.
• $wgDjvuToXML, without deprecation; the tool it enables is obsolete and abandoned upstream. Use $wgDjvuDump to use that tool instead.

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