Choosing MediaWiki

Choosing MediaWiki for a Hosted Website

If you are contemplating creating a website it soon becomes obvious that it will need to be hosted somewhere, you will need a domain name so it can be found, and you will be led by Internet searches to various hosting providers and domain registrars, both of which may offer to register the domain name of your choice and host the website, and market various tools to get a website established quickly and easily.

Some have their own website builder utilities; others promote services such as Wix; and probably all promote Wordpress. Very few will mention MediaWiki in their marketing. And document management software like Joomla is somehow treated like an historical artifact.

Statistically, the majority of hosted websites are based on Wordpress. It is ideal for blogging, small business, focussed websites and even some large government departments use it. Is it right for you? Depends what you want to do. Following a major code revision in 2018 Wordpress implemented the Gutenburg Block Editor which was a brilliant move but takes a bit of effort to wrap your head around. Most users probably just select a Theme that suits the website purpose and add content to the blocks provided. Customising it or creating your own Wordpress theme takes more time.

MediaWiki is completely different. It is less 'visual'. Writing this is just text on a page in a text editor (I use html, don't use wikitext and therefore cannot use a visual editor) so I won't see what the page looks like until it is saved.

But if I want to link to other pages it is 'simple as'. Wiki software is like that. It is designed for a mesh of interlinked ideas; each page can contain many links so the relationship is many --> many. It is not a hierarchy of pages like a traditional website, although tags or categories can form a tree structure for simple indexing and cross-referencing.

MediaWiki can be scaled to suit corporations and government departments, although many would probably implement Microsoft's SharePoint^©.

If you choose MediaWiki for a website ensure that your hosting provider has it available through cPanel --> Softaculous with an automated installer. This will simplify getting started.

It is also worth the time spent trialling a few things and then trashing the site and starting over, and as a way to get familiar with the software, its' features, cPanel and the tools available.

I have set up like a 'main' website on a domain and then 'development' sites in sub-domains so I can test things before implementing on the live website.

One thing you can be sure of with a MediaWiki-based website - learning how to actually use the product can be time consuming and frustrating. If you have found this website I hope it is useful!

MediaWiki and the mh370wiki.net website

I have absolutely no regrets using MediaWiki for this website. Many smaller websites related to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 are built using Wordpress or other software, and that is ok.

The mh370wiki.net website has grown to the extent that the database is approaching 1GB in size and the images and files total another GB.

Several features of MediaWiki are absolutely essential for the mh370wiki.net website:-

Easy linking - there are literally thousands of links, and the Tools --> Special Pages --> Maintenance reports makes it easy to find link errors to be fixed.
Namespaces - unique perhaps to MediaWiki the ability to segment content into separate named sections and then apply rules to allow or deny access means that content for public viewing is accessible; content for development or later use is 'hidden'; and yet it is possible to display defined pieces of 'hidden' content in visible spaces using transclusion, as below.
Transclusion - the ability to show content on a page by reference to an external source with a single line of code. An ability to keep a master copy of some content and re-use it in different pages or different contexts, but if it needs to be edited only the 'master' is updated and the other instances get updated automatically. This feature is used for templates too. All the menu buttons are transcluded into menus and the menus are transcluded into pages. Transclusion is a powerful feature and the mh370wiki.net website wouldn't be the same without it.
Templates - these are used for ensuring that content is presented with consistent structures; reusable headings and styles coded in a template means that a change made to a template is implemented wherever that template has been used. Some templates have been used hundreds of times. MediaWiki makes it easy to see where a template has been used and they are all stored in a specific Template: namespace so are indexed by name.

MediaWiki itself has been upgraded over the life of the mh370wiki.net project. MediaWiki is foundational for Wikipedia so it is expected to have a long life, unlike some other open-source software. The Long Term Support versions are stable. There is a published lifecycle. It is a product that can be relied upon into the future. That is also essential for a project such as the mh370wiki.net website.

Conclusion

Make a decision based on a clear definition of your goals and vision for the future of your website. There are many options out there and MediaWiki is not the answer to all of them. But for projects like the mh370wiki.net website it is absolutely suitable. I was going to write 'absolutely perfect' but that wouldn't be quite true. I wish it was a bit easier to master, but for me it is the most suitable product out there. And, as open-source software, it is also free...

Grant