Edit 2016/Making MediaWiki your own - the skins and extensions that make wikipedia wikipedia, and wikihow wikihow, and whatever whatever: Submissions:2019/“Wikipedians are born, not made” – applying the learnings from a 10-year-old research paper after all

Title

Making MediaWiki your own - the skins and extensions that make Wikipedia Wikipedia, and wikiHow wikiHow, and whatever whatever

Theme

tech

Type of submission

presentation

Author

Kim Schoonover

E-mail address

zhorishnagmail.com

Username

Isarra

Affiliation

MediaWiki Farmers usergroup

Abstract

MediaWiki, by itself, is not that interesting. It's a large and fairly robust product and does a lot of very complicated and important things under the hood, but to the user, a base, vanilla MediaWiki install just doesn't do much. It has pages, and that's about it. The framework for the utter magic lingers, unseen behind it all, waiting for extensions to put it to use.

This presentation, in broad strokes, will cover various examples of the diversity of what is possible with MediaWiki, across Wikimedia projects and also various prominent third-party projects:

• Wikipedia, as a collaborative encyclopaedia across many, many languages
• wikiHow, as how-to articles on various topics, with discussion, q&a, and integrated tools for maintenance and improvement
• Archwiki and others as documentation and user-oriented help pages for running open-source tools
• Wikidata and wikibase
• Others, and potential possibilities that have yet to be seen (between parser options, content models, etc), including just some of the more unusual extensions that exist in gerrit (Wikimedia repositories and code review)

And the extensions that make it all possible.

May also go into some of how the extensions work, how third-party projects set up and develop for MediaWiki, and how far more than what we have in gerrit exists out there in the wild (partially just because getting stuff into gerrit is so difficult), and some of the pitfalls of this broad extensibility.

Length of presentation

15-30 min.

Preferred room size

???

Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?

Maybe; my attendance will have little to do with whether or not my submissions are accepted and everything to do with budget.

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