Maintaining MediaWiki
A Guide to Using MediaWiki in a Hosted Environment
An instructional website by the developer of mh370wiki.net - a MediaWiki site about Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
How to Maintain MediaWiki
There are two easily identifiable types of Maintenance for a MediaWiki-based website:-
- Routine maintenance - tasks which should be done frequently.
- Regular maintenance - such as upgrades, which can only be done following a new release of MediaWiki.
Routine Maintenance
The Tools --> Special Pages --> Maintenance Reports lists many items that should be looked at. The most common issues are likely to be:-
- Wanted pages - typically caused by or an indicator of broken links
Note: The Sidebar (Menu) needs to be checked separately because link errors are not included in Wanted pages - Wanted categories - a page has been added to a category but the category was either never created or the page reference is incorrect
- Wanted templates - should be immediately noticeable when viewing a page, but possibly just a typing error
Note: If templates are in sub-pages and the top level page holds instructions and is not used as a template, these pages will be listed as Wanted templates but are not actually a problem. - Broken redirects - the redirect created when a page was moved still exists but the destination page is not there anymore.
Finding and fixing these issues may be time-consuming but avoids web server errors and ensures website quality.
Regular Maintenance
The MediaWiki version lifecycle should be consulted regularly and upgrades scheduled with planned downtime.
An upgrade policy may be useful - do you implement each minor release? Or each major release? Or wait for the Long Term Support versions only?
Upgrades can be time-consuming, involve lots of testing and compatibility-checking, and may require (or cause) significant down-time. So plan accordingly.
Other Tasks
The Systems Administrator may be the person responsible for other tasks:-
- Reviewing the logs and statistics on cPanel.
- Making regular backups.
- Checking security status, assess risks, view logs, take action.
- Add and remove Users. Check for spurious user accounts. Check permissions.
- ... and other typical sysadmin functions.
Articles which relate to maintaining MediaWiki
Articles which relate to maintaining MediaWiki are included in Category:Maintain.
The CategoryTree Extension enables a listing of relevant sub-categories and pages:-
Links
- Version lifecycle
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle
- Manual:Maintenance scripts
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Maintenance_scripts
According to this resource, 'MediaWiki contains over 200 maintenance scripts, which have varying degrees of general utility and quality.'
For the adminsitrators of most hosted MediaWiki-based websites most of these scripts will either be not needed, too risky, or beyond common levels of confidence or expertise.
This page also says 'In order to run most scripts, you will need access to the command line of the server or shell access through an SSH client like ssh or PuTTY.' Most hosting services using cPanel as the interface will provide access to a Terminal window cPanel --> Advanced --> Terminal which can be used when command-line access is required.