Updating this Documentation

Source Repository and Read the Docs

The source code for this documentation is hosted on GitHub. Changes made there will automatically be compiled and appear on Read the Docs.

Compiling the Docs Locally

Todo

Add general instructions for compiling the docs. Note that these can also be found in the README.

Updating the MediaWiki Configuration File

Todo

Document method of creating a pre-configured LocalSettings.php file, which is just a modified version of the file created by default by the script maintenance/install.php.

Updating Templates Exported from Wikipedia

The XML files used in Install Citation Tools and similar pages were exported from Wikipedia and may be too old to work with future releases of MediaWiki and/or some extensions (especially Scribunto). If you intend to update the docs to use a much newer version of MediaWiki, you may need to generate new versions of the XML files.

It is possible that you can just re-export the necessary Module and Template pages from Wikipedia, as is decribed in the footnotes on the relevant doc pages. However, if Wikipedia is running a version of MediaWiki or an extension that is newer than the version you plan to upgrade to, and backwards-incompatible changes have been made to the pages you need to export from Wikipedia, simply importing the current versions of these pages may fail in unusual ways (e.g., odd citation rendering errors).

By digging through the histories of these pages and using a binary search guess-and-check strategy, is possible to identify older versions of the pages that are compatible with whichever version of MediaWiki you want to upgrade to. It may help to review the MediaWiki version timeline to get a good initial guess for a date.

Once you have identified a particular moment in time when Wikipedia was using versions of the pages that are compatible with your upgraded MediaWiki installation, you can export a snapshot of all the pages you need from that time using the command line. Here is an example:

curl -d "&action=submit&offset=2014-06-01T00:00:00Z&limit=1&dir=desc&pages=
    Module:Arguments
    Module:Category handler
    Module:Category handler/blacklist
    etc. ...
    " http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Export -o "message-box-modules.xml"