HOWTO: Create page on Mediawiki

Introduction

This article offer the basic guidelines of HOWTO: create page on Mediawiki. This guideline was written specifically for those who are new to Mediawiki and are not aware of how to create documentation page on Mediawiki.

Mediawiki is a wiki engine used by Wikipedia and it is so-called open source application. Medaiwiki consists of collection of Wikipages with information. User can create and edit these pages due to its universally accessible nature. It has a number of tools to make process quite easy to track changes so that everyone can see who does what and if something goes wrong it can be easily fixed by an administrator. There are various way to search for information and it is also possible to organize the information in categories. By using internal and external links, user can refer to other pages in the wiki as well as pages of World Wide Web. User can upload files and due to its centralized nature data can be displayed in the browser such as images, spreadsheets, word documents, power point and PDF’s etc.

Purpose

This article shows how to create a Mediawiki page for writing documentation as well as how to upload images on Wikipedia Commons: upload wizard, to use these images in generating Mediawiki page. Wikipedia Commons is a Mediawiki utility which forwards you to Wikipedia page to upload Files as much you wanted to upload.

Procedure

Type https://www.mediawiki.org in your Browser. Click on "Create account".
Enter your personal information to setup an account on Mediawiki. Type username (publically visible) and password.
At the top right corner, click on the respective username to create a page on Mediawiki.
Click on "create this page" to open a new window for writing content.
Point the cursor to "switch editor" option and select "source editing" from the drop down list.
Type the content you want to display by manually typing or you can alternatively copy/ paste the mediawiki markup content from another source.
Click on "show preview" button to view the page.
Check the contents.
Click on "Publish page" button.
Your page has been created on Mediawiki. Make any changes if required by clicking on "edit source" link.
Click on Mediawiki Commons → In other projects. On the left side of your Mediawiki page.
Click on Upload file in Wikipedia Commons. It will ask for "login" to upload files. Provide same username and password used for Mediawiki login. It will forward you to new page name Wikimedia Commons → upload wizard. Click on "next" button and select media you want to share.
Click on the continue button to proceed further. Select the radio button "This is my own work" to provide copyright for the image. Write the description of the uploaded file and select the publish date. Click on "next" it will show some warnings. Click "Ok".
If it shows some error while uploading file change the file name accordingly. The file is uploaded successfully. Use the file name in your Mediawiki documentation creation to use image on Mediawiki page.
To see all uploaded image click on "uploads" to see file list of images.
To create other pages in Mediawiki on same "user: your name" ('here Demo02') directory. copy the url of recently created Mediawiki page and paste it in the new browser window. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Demo1441, put backslash(/) and write your new Mediawiki page name ('here my_new_page') after it. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Demo1441/my_new_page and create the new page by clicking "create this page" link. Repeat the steps from 4 to 10.
To create a page on Sanbox. Click on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox. login to the page using your same username and password used for Wikimedia login. It will add the "Sandbox" utility to your Mediawiki page. Click on " sandbox" on upper right corner and start writing your content or copy/paste from some other source. This link is providing a demonstration sandbox link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Demo1441/sandbox.

The mediawiki accounts are only used for testing the mediawiki software. They are not to be used for testing one’s own pages; that’s why the organization provided the sandbox.

Conclusion

This guideline show the basic step-by-step procedure to create a fresh page on Mediawiki for those who are new to documentaion writing and not aware of how to upload images on Wikimedia Commons.