Back in 2024, I was introduced with mediawiki in an online wiki session. I thought it is a place to put images and videos to the wikipedia articles as name says so. Then I research more about it and found out it is the powerhouse of wikimedia. A complete overall software in which all the projects of wikimedia foundation runs on.
MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software, written in PHP, that powers websites where users can collaboratively create and edit content. It is most famously used by Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects, but also by thousands of other organizations for internal knowledge bases, documentation, and content management. The software is known for being powerful, scalable, and robust.
I feel like home as I can see and understand things on which the bits are changing. So then I tried to try it out by installing myself. But installing it by your own is not an easy job if you are from non-technical background or even if you have never used PHP as we need to tweak some changes in the internal scripts to make it work. And how can you forget SQL database the place where you will be going to store your information.
For installing mediawiki software you need some prerequisites on your computer and Note: You can't install it on your phone like a Game. It's an optimised software designed to run on a decent computing power.
Ram and Storage Needed
The recommended minimum requirements are 256MB of RAM for a single-computer website and 85MB of storage, although this will not suffice for a busy public site or a site with uploading enabled. Some users have reported running MediaWiki on computers with as little as 48MB of RAM. ~ reddit.
This is what I came up with reddit and google search but let me tell you this isn't true. If you want to use it lag free then you must need at least 4 GB RAM, 4 GB Empty Storage, i3/ryzen 3 processor or you will face frequent lag or even freezes.
Prerequisites
PHP
A web server Apache or Ngnix
Database (Mariadb, Postgre, SQL)
or quick and easy
PHP
Software Bundle
* XAMPP for windows
* MAMP for macOS
and the main software itself from here - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download
Mediawiki Workshop
I have the pleasure to organise the full day workshop at my college for new open source developers to let them aware about the scope of technical contribution in wikimedia space.
There were among 20 students who were present with different operating systems. Some were using college's computer UBUNTU some of them were using WINDOWS and one guy was on MacOS.
I have spent sleepless nights inorder to get learn and get familier with all the Operating system to tell in workshop to all. This was a bit challenging as I installed macos for the very first time on virtual machine the ventura version and handling brew and different keyboard (command in place of control) for that guy got me. But anyhow I still managed to prepare seperate folders in advance for all with PHP.ini configurations and commands to copy paste to gets things done quickly.
My Learnings
I can now operate 3 operating systems and can tell you how to set up one by yourself. Not only this I learnt from the situation to be ready to adapt and grasp new things quickly. As I encountered so many things for first time like gadgets, scripts, skins, extentions. I was reading docs not only for me but in a way to let also understand them in an easy way.
How I measured success?
Most of the participants had setup their local mediawiki softwares with PHP and SQL. They have created their first wiki related page and have uploaded a custom logo. They had learnt to toggle skins from preferences like minerva or others. They are quite a bit familier with gadgets and their workings.
Also didn't got bored as they again come in the next workshop. Which I will discuss in the next blog.
Mediawiki Bundle Link: https://wikisati.web.app/
