MediaWiki Introduction 2023

MediaWiki Introduction 2023 is a 3-part series by Timo Tijhof, to familiarize new maintainers and managers with MediaWiki. It was originally written in December 2023 for the MediaWiki Code Jam.

Part 1: MediaWiki core concepts

Watch on Wikimedia Commons. • Watch on YouTube

Timestamps:

00:00 Outline
00:50 Database schema
01:37 Users
02:55 Preferences
04:12 Localisation
05:02 Permissions
08:50 Bot passwords
10:10 Logging
11:58 Comments
12:35 Recent changes
15:39 Pages
16:00 Namespaces
18:14 Revisions
18:20 Example: Save an edit
19:59 Example: View a page
20:52 Link tables
21:02 Categories
24:20 Templates
25:05 Image links
25:59 GLAM
26:43 External links
27:40 Statistics
28:02 Search
29:14 JobQueue
31:58 Multimedia

Topics covered in the video:

High-level product and architecture perspective.
Component walk-through.

Pages mentioned:

Part 2: Wikipedia's extensions

Watch on Wikimedia Commons. • Watch on YouTube

Timestamps:

00:00 Outline
00:25 What is an extension?
01:52 How to install an extension?
02:01 Install WikiEditor
02:54 Install VisualEditor
03:58 Wikipedia's extensions
04:10 CentralAuth
04:38 Echo
04:56 OAuth for MediaWiki
05:40 Editor extensions
05:48 Parser extensions
06:37 Cite extension
07:37 EasyTimeline
07:56 InputBox extension
08:38 Scribunto
09:38 Faster editing performance
11:24 Media handlers
11:31 TimedMediaHandler
11:42 3D extension for MediaWiki
11:57 Spam prevention extensions
12:35 Gadgets
13:05 Gadget demo
13:41 Gadget examples

Topics covered in the video:

What is an extension?
How to install an extension in two easy steps.
Walk-through the installed extensions via Wikipedia's Special:Version page.

Pages mentioned:

Part 3: Write your first patch

Are you ready to write your first patch?

This is not a minimal example for learning Git, or contributing a typo-fix to MediaWiki (which you could do by cloning the Git repo, directly modifying a file, and relying on a code reviewer to test/merge it for you). Rather, the below prepares you to understand other people's patches (as manager), or to prepare you for becoming an active MediaWiki developer. As such, it includes learning how to preview the result of your change in a web browser, and running the unit tests on your machine.

Homework

Before you write your first patch:

Download MediaWiki. I recommend Quickstart to install MediaWiki with only Git and PHP. (No Docker, Apache, or MySQL needed!)
Run PHPUnit. This checks that everything got installed correctly. From your mediawiki directory, run composer phpunit -- tests/phpunit/includes/ResourceLoader/
Run QUnit, by browsing to http://localhost:4000/index.php/Special:JavaScriptTest
Add the Examples extension to your MediaWiki site.

Exercise 1: Edit a localisation message

Browse to http://localhost:4000/index.php/Special:HelloWorld
Change the page title by editing the "example-helloworld" message in the mediawiki/extensions/examples/i18n/en.json file.
Refresh Special:HelloWorld in the browser and notice the change.

✅ Done!

How do extensions work?

The wfLoadExtension() line you added to LocalSettings, loads extension.json from the given extension. This file is the main source for everything related to that extension. Everything it can do starts in, and is discoverable from, this file. Have a look at mediawiki/extensions/examples/extension.json.

The first few fields are metadata you may recognise from Special:Version, such as the authors, the url, and the "type" that each extension is grouped under. The "SpecialPages" field is the registry where we declare our special pages. "AutoloadNamespaces" is similarly a registry, where we define a PHP namespace the PHP classes in our repository. These are then discovered and loaded automatically by MediaWiki.

For later: Manual:Extension registration, Manual:Extension.json/Schema, Best practices for extensions, Manual:Coding conventions/PHP.

How do special pages work?

As we learned in Part 1, Special:SpecialPages enumerates all special pages. Both from MediaWiki core, and from extensions you have enabled. The examples/extension.json file registers "Special:HelloWorld", which you can visit at http://localhost:4000/index.php/Special:HelloWorld.

MediaWiki takes care of interpreting and routing URLs. This URL is for the "Special" namespace, which MediaWiki looks up in the SpecialPages registry. MediaWiki loves registries like these, which automatically take care of most of the work, allowing you to focus on business logic instead of boilerplate.

MediaWiki finds and constructs a SpecialHelloWorld instance for you, and wraps the skin (sidebar, navigation, styling etc) around its output. It gives control to you in the SpecialHelloWorld::execute() method. Have a look in examples/includes/SpecialHelloWorld.php.

How does localisation work? You can debug the localisation system any time by using uselang=qqx. This is harmless and works on the live Wikipedia, too. Visit Special:HelloWorld?uselang=qqx to see which message keys are used. These messages come from the /i18n/en.json file in the examples repo.

Exercise 2: Create a localisation message

Add a new key to /i18n/en.json with a short sentence as the value. For example "example-goodbye": "That's all Folks!".
Render this message as the second paragraph on the page, by adding a statement to SpecialHelloWorld::execute. Look at the existing intro message for how to do this.
Refresh Special:HelloWorld in the browser and notice the second paragraph.

✅ Done!

Exercise 3: Make a config change

Browse to your wiki's Main Page at http://localhost:4000/ and notice the "Hi there" banner.
Edit LocalSettings.php and disable this feature by adding $wgExampleEnableWelcome = false; .
Hard-refresh your wikis' Main Page in the browser and notice the the banner is gone.
Comment out or remove the LocalSettings line to re-enable the banner. Refresh to see it come back.

✅ Done! How did that work?

Extensions can be configurable

This feature flag is defined in examples/extension.json as "ExampleEnableWelcome", under "config". This flag has a default of true.

This "config" map is another one of those automated registries that does heavy lifting for you. It takes care of validation, documentation, default values, applying LocalSettings, and letting you access the result in PHP code (for the current wiki) via MediaWikiServices->getMainConfig.

As the site admin, you can change the value of any configuration value by editing LocalSettings, and setting variables named as "wg" (wiki global) + the configuration key. For example, $wgExampleEnableWelcome in this case.

For later: Manual:Configuration for developers, Manual:Extension.json/Schema#config.

Excercise 4: Edit a hook handler

We're going to change the "Hi there" banner to display on special pages instead of articles. Notice the banner is currently shown on the Main Page, but not at Special:HelloWorld.

Edit function onBeforePageDisplay in examples/includes/Hooks.php, and change the condition from NS_MAIN to NS_SPECIAL. See also Namespaces, from Part 1.
Refresh and notice the banner now shows on Special:HelloWorld instead of Main Page.

✅ Done!

How do hooks work? Hooks are named events provided by MediaWiki core (or other extensions) that any extension can listen to (known as "handling a hook"). For example, MediaWiki core may contain code like $x = [ 42 ]; HookRunner->onFoo( &$x ); . By default the $x array will stay unchanged, but your extension may handle this hook as follows:

namespace MediaWiki\Extension\Example;
class Hooks {
    public function onFoo( &$x ) {
        $x[] = 3.14;
    }
}

In extension.json, the "Hooks" field adds to a central registry, indicating which hooks have a listener, and what functions to call for that hook. When the hook is "run", MediaWiki will call each of the functions listening for that hook, thus acting as if HookRunner->onFoo() directly called your function. In the above exercise, we handled the BeforePageDisplay hook. Find the registration in examples/extension.json, and follow the trail from there, via "HookHandlers", to "MediaWiki\Extension\Example\Hooks", to examples/includes/Hooks.php.

Excercise 5: Improve test and fix the bug

Did you notice that the welcome message at http://localhost:4000/ currently greets you with the wrong day? Let's fix this!

Edit the welcome.js file in examples/resources/. Do you spot the off-by-one error?
Verify that today's greeting on the Main Page is now correct.
Run the tests at http://localhost:4000/index.php/Special:JavaScriptTest?filter=example. The tests are currently passing both with and without your fix.
Open the ext.Example.welcome.test.js file from the examples/tests/qunit/ directory. It uses 2011-04-01 as an example, which was a Friday. The test does not strictly assert the entire return value, it only checks that it includes a greeting. Improve the unit test by using assert.strictEqual() like assert.strictEqual(actual, 'example-welcome-title-user') instead of assert.true(actual.includes('example-welcome-title-user')). We don't know the shape of this value yet, so we can expect a different '' value for now. Refresh Special:JavaScriptTest, and take the actual result from there.
Copy the actual result from the failing test at Special:JavaScriptTest, and use it as your expected value with assert.strictEqual(). We now have a passing test that (correctly) expects Friday instead of Saturday.

✅ Done! Now let's take a look underneath.

How do extensions create ResourceLoader modules?

extension.json ("ResourceModules" is another registry, "dependencies", "packageFiles")
ResourceLoader/Developing with ResourceLoader
onBeforePageDisplay calls OutputPage::addModule, which is responsible for changing the HTML so that your module is loaded on the page.
The welcome.js file and styles.css files are part of this module.

How do I create a unit test?

ext.Example.welcome.test.js (find it in extension.json)
Run via Special:JavaScriptTest?filter=welcome (filter optional, but helps focus and runs faster)

For later: Manual:JavaScript unit testing

🎉 Congratulations, you are well on your journey to becoming a MediaWiki hacker!

If you have a mentor or onboarding buddy, you can share your work via a Phabricator paste:

Copy the output from git diff. For example, git diff | pbcopy on macOS. Or on Linux/Windows, save it as a temporary file with git diff > tmp.txt, then open that file in your text editor, select all, and copy that to your clipboard.
Create Phabricator paste