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The Support desk is currently undergoing an overhaul (restructuring). Please be lenient :-) – September 2008

Welcome to MediaWiki.org's Support desk, the central on-wiki place to ask questions about the MediaWiki software!

The greater purpose of this page is to make our Manual and other available help so good that you do not have to come here to ask questions, or if we know where the page is you are looking for, making that easier to find.

Before posting a question here, please check out the recommended communication possibilities, and also check that your question is not already answered elsewhere on this site (see box on the right).

Well, just as it is the case on most forums, questions on this page are unlikely to be answered very quickly, and may not get answered at all. Usually you have to wait a few days for a reply. If there are call backs from other users trying to solve your problem, please reply as specific as you can. In case you found a solution yourself in the meantime, please leave a short note, so that the thread can be closed.

To post a new question

1. To help us answer your question, please always indicate which versions you are using:

  • MediaWiki (reported by your wiki's Special:Version page)
  • PHP (likewise)
  • the database (likewise, e.g. MySQL 4.1)

2. To allow others to examine the issue, it's often neat to also state the URL of your wiki (if it's not locked down, intranet-only, or such).
3. Don't forget to sign your comment with --~~~~ at the end.
4. Now, please click the appropriate link below:

Further notes (fine print): Topics are usually marked as RESOLVED, if they are actually solved (of course), but also if the user seeking support does not answer questions seeking more information within a week, or (often) if a user is seeking support for an unstable (not recommended) version of MediaWiki. Very old, unsolved topics can be marked as OUTDATED. Off-topic threads can be removed on spot.
There is no "official" forum, but there are some private ones as e.g. mwusers.com that might be better places to ask your question if you prefer forums to seek help.

Contents


[edit] Installation/Legalities Support

[edit] MySQL Database Authentication Problem

  • MediaWiki: 1.12.0
  • PHP: 5.2.4
  • MySQL: 5.0.24a
  • URL: Company Intranet

In the Database Config section of installation, MediaWiki asks for the MySQL database name, username, and password.

I provide all of this information, but then I click the install button, I keep getting an error telling me to check the username and password. I don't get it. I followed installation instructions explicitly.

My MySQL commands are as follows:

mysqladmin -u root -p create wikidb
mysql -u root -p -e "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wikidb.* TO wikiuser IDENTIFIED BY 'wiki_password'"
mysql -u root -p -e "SET PASSWORD FOR wikiuser = OLD_PASSWORD('wiki_password')"
mysql -u root -p -e "FLUSH PRIVILEGES"

Where I've changed "wikiuser" and "wiki_password" to something more appropriate. The syntax is fine, and no typos exist. I enter the information letter for letter in the Database Config section, and I still receive the password authentication error, and for the life of me, I cannot figure out why.

Chris at MFS.

—72.85.252.217 19:57, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Upgrading to MW 1.12 without shell access

I updated the english version of our wiki from Version 1.11 to 1.12. Since we don't have shell access and "proc_open()" is disabled by our hosting company, there was only "Alternative 2" left. So I copied all the files of the 1.12-version into the existing folders of our wiki. In that way old files were replaced but things like extensions and images were kept. Everything worked fine but after running the installation there was a fatal error when browsing the wiki. It said: "Fatal error: Call to undefined method ParserOptions::enableLimitReport() in /home/httpd/vhosts/wiki-products.org/subdomains/en/httpdocs/includes/Article.php on line 3172". Since i didn't know what to make of that, I replaced "Article.php" with the old 1.11-version (lucky me, I did the back-up before) and now things seem to be running fine again. However, before I go on to upgrade the much larger (and more important) german version of our wiki, I would like to be sure, that this is the way to do it and that no further problems will emerge from this. Thanks for helping!

—Gollum 11:11, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Just to let you know. This problem was resolved by upgrading to Mediawiki 1.13 . My best, --Gollum 11:15, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Once installed via ftp, I cannot continue configuration thru /config/index.php

Hi,

I've installed MediaWiki on the Host (MediaWiki v1.12.0, PHP5, MySQL 5.0.45) of our school. 'Feel a bit a newb (which I am) but I do hope someone can help me with this. Anyway, I have installed via ftp, and can get to the index.php script in public_html by entering the above URL. All directories and scrips seem to be in place, I've set the file attributes of the /config folder to '777'.

I then get to see the initial index.php in the root. Once I click on the 'Please set up the wiki first.' link (which should redirect me to /config/index.php), I get to the 'Admin' login screen of my Host. Does this somehow ring a bell to you?

Thanks for your help in this. Erik Coolen, The Netherlands (ecoolen@ict-idcollege.nl) —82.169.26.209 11:22, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Weird sudden failure of wiki

  • MediaWiki: very latest version (just installed a few days ago)
  • PHP: 5.2.5
  • MySQL: 5.0.45-community-log
  • URL: http://wiki/berrysoft.net

I changed nothing on my server, and now when I go to my wiki (http://wiki.berrysoft.net) I get this:

Warning: require_once(/home/berrysof/public_html/wiki/extensions/InterWikiLinkManager/InterWikiLinkManager.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: 
No such file or directory in /home/berrysof/public_html/wiki/LocalSettings.php on line 138

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/home/berrysof/public_html/wiki/extensions/InterWikiLinkManager/InterWikiLinkManager.php' (include_path='/home/berrysof/public_html/wiki:/home/berrysof/public_html/wiki/includes:/home/berrysof/public_html/wiki/languages:.:/usr/local/php52/pear') 
in /home/berrysof/public_html/wiki/LocalSettings.php on line 138

I have no clue what to do!

Patrick Waugh Berrysoft Studios —98.211.63.103 20:09, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] No install directory in /usr/share/doc/mediawiki-x.y.z/INSTALL on fedora 9

On fedora 9 i ran yum install mediawiki. Install went well, but there was suppose to be

"After installation, open the file /usr/share/doc/mediawiki-x.y.z/INSTALL.fedora and follow the instructions there."

The only dirs. were.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  17997 2008-03-03 01:05 COPYING
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    162 2008-03-03 01:05 FAQ
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 211867 2008-03-03 01:05 HISTORY
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   3535 2008-03-03 01:05 README
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  29739 2008-03-03 01:05 RELEASE-NOTES
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  12816 2008-03-03 01:05 UPGRADE

[edit] Empty page after installing Wiki

  • MediaWiki: 1.1.2
  • PHP: 5.2.6
  • MySQL: 5.0.51a
  • URL: Wiki

Changed my hosting to PHP5. Trying to install wiki - setup goes just fine, with info about moving LocalSettings.php to directory above... After i moved it, and pointing to mysite/wiki - just empty page goes out. No errors, no warnings. Empty page.

Solved as described above: LocalSettings.php add: $wgParserConf['preprocessorClass'] = 'Preprocessor_Hash';

—82.179.222.150 15:55, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Don't create localsettings.php after to click install mediawiki button

  • MediaWiki: mediawiki-1.11.2
  • PHP: PHP5.2.5 Zend Optimizer
  • MySQL: MySQL 5.0.45
  • URL: ...

Hi~!

I have a question.

When I try to install mediawiki in my PC, do not create localsettings.php

When I have clicked install button for installing mediawiki, I.E window shutdowned.

What I have to do for install mediawiki?

—210.127.34.1 03:37, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Install Error

Install Error: Call to undefined function pg_escape_string() in /var/www/html/wiki/includes/DatabasePostgres.php

I'm not able to install and configure MediaWiki. My system configuration is running RedHat Linux release 4, and the initial page reports the following:

PHP 5.2.6 installed
Found database drivers for: PostgreSQL
PHP server API is apache2handler; ok, using pretty URLs (index.php/Page_Title)
Have XML / Latin1-UTF-8 conversion support.
Warning: A value for session.save_path has not been set in PHP.ini. If the default value causes problems with saving session data,
set it to a valid path which is read/write/execute for the user your web server is running under.
PHP's memory_limit is 128M.
Couldn't find Turck MMCache, eAccelerator, APC or XCache; cannot use these for object caching.
Found GNU diff3: /usr/bin/diff3.
Found ImageMagick: /usr/bin/convert; image thumbnailing will be enabled if you enable uploads.
Installation directory: /var/www/html/wiki
Script URI path: /wiki
Installing MediaWiki with php file extensions
Environment checked. You can install MediaWiki.

I can enter the configuration screen, but it crashes with the following message

Generating configuration file..
Database type: PostgreSQL
Loading class: DatabasePostgres
Attempting to connect to database "postgres" as superuser "postgres"...
Checking the version of Postgres...version 8.3 is OK.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function pg_escape_string() in /var/www/html/wiki/includes/DatabasePostgres.php on line 1215

I've never used PHP and have absolutely no idea what this means.  :^(

I don't know if it's relevant, but one of the problems I had was in setting up PHP5; RHEL4 doesn't have an installable package, so I created it from source using the instructions at: http://www.blazonry.com/scripting/install_apache.php#dso

Roger —198.152.70.2 14:30, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Has anybody got any ideas about this?
198.152.70.2 07:30, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I'm adding another comment to keep this question live. Cheers
198.152.70.2 07:33, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
Help anybody?
198.152.70.2 08:03, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] (RESOLVED) Upgrade from MW 1.11.0 to 1.12.0

  • MediaWiki: Version MediaWiki 1.11.0 & 1.12.0
  • PHP: Version 5.2.5
  • MySQL: using MySQL 5.0

I tried the upgrade of MediaWiki on my computer (before to do it on the real server). I used the Alternative #2, because I don't have shell access on the final server. Whatever, everything seems to go well (no error message during the "installation"), but the wiki is then unavailable : there is only one white page without errors. What's the problem then ? What can I do ? :-(

Matt84 12:11, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

A blank page mean that there's a PHP error, but hidden. See How to debug to enable error reporting and then come back with the error message. iAlex 21:25, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
seems ok now. Thanks. Matt84 19:53, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Receiving a PHP Fatal Error: Class 'WebRequest' not found in includes/Setup.php

  • MediaWiki: 1.13.0
  • PHP: 5.2.5
  • MySQL: 5.0.51a-community
  • URL: CellAO

I'm receiving an error

Fatal error: Class 'WebRequest' not found in /home/pastxter/public_html/cellao/includes/Setup.php on line 147

When I click the "Install MediaWiki!" button after the initial checks have completed. I'm not sure why this is happening

$wgRequest = new WebRequest; is Line 147

It's like AutoLoader.php doesn't actually include includes\WebRequest.php like it seems to be supposed to

-Charles —207.232.113.236 04:27, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New Namespace edit goes to edit of Talk page

I have set up a special namespace. But when I try to edit a page the session opens as a talk page, and when I go to the actual page, the talk page opens!

Installed

  • Configure (Version 0.5.7) Allow authorised users to configure the wiki by a web-based interface Alexandre Emsenhuber Parser hooks
  • EmbedVideo (Version 0.1.2) Adds a parser function aembedding video from popular sources. Jim R. Wilson - wilson.jim.r<at>gmail.com
  • Google Co-op Extension Using Google Co-op Liang Chen The BiGreat
  • NiceCategoryList generate a category page showing all pages in a category, including subcategories Kichik, Johan the Ghost Andre
  • GoogleTranslate (Version 0.2) Ajax-based link translation that translates edittext from/to via GoogleTranslate Per Feldvoss Olsen

[edit] Old versions of Mediawiki?

  • MediaWiki: 1.13.0
  • PHP: 5.2.6 (cgi)
  • MySQL: 5.0.51a-community
  • URL: (in development)

Do we have old versions of Mediawiki somewhere? I had 1.9.3 and when I upgraded to 1.13.0, it gives me an "illegal mix of collations" error, when I view Page logs. I thought I'd try incrementally upgrading the software to see if that would work. —Kenny5 04:11, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Are you looking for a list such as Important Release Notes? Manual:Upgrading to 1.13 could help too. --:bdk: 19:06, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Vulnerability that needs to be fixed

me and some friends were scanning my site and found a vulnerability. please fix it...

/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=edit&gen=js&useskin=>"><ScRiPt%20%0a%0d>alert(398498917898)%3B</ScRiPt>

--68.91.112.121 25 August 2008

[edit] MediaWiki System Support

[edit] Adding extra buttons to Media Wikis

Product Version

  • MediaWiki 1.12.0
  • PHP 5.2.5 (cgi)
  • MySQL 5.0.51a-community

Hi. I want to ask this question outright. How do you add the table button and others like the wikipedia one, onto our own? Hours of trawling the net still leave this question unanswered!!!!

[EDIT] - URL: lemonbiscuit.org.uk/wiki

193.123.228.22 10:30, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Complete Deleting of an User Account

How is it possible? There are several double accounts and no more need for it. MediaWiki 1.12.0 PHP 5.2.6 (cgi) MySQL 5.0.51a-12 --Krischan 18:26, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

You can use Extension:User Merge and Delete. --MF-Warburg 15:12, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Revering mass vandalism

Are their any way to ban users and undo all of his\her edits instantly? Do I need any extension(s) to do this?--64.79.177.254 17:58, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] automatic reload of wiki pages

  • MediaWiki 1.12.0
  • PHP 5.1.2
  • MySQL 4.1

Hi, I just added the <dirlist>-extension to my MediaWiki and figured out, that the Wiki doesn't automatically reload the page to refresh the directory list. This is unfortunatelly not very helpful if you want to know what in a folder is:-). Do you have any recommendations, maybe a function to force wiki to recreate the page with every user access? Thanks a lot

-- Roland, 4 June 2008

[edit] Displaying links to a page

I want to have a section on my Wikiversity page that displays what other pages link to it. For example, within the project, there will be many pages that can cross-reference each other, so I want all pages that link to one page to be displayed toward the bottom of that page. Does this make sense? If so, what would be the easiest way to go about doing that? Thanks! 122.102.199.90 11:42, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Try using the transclusion

{{Special:WhatLinksHere/name-of-your-page}}

where "name-of-your-page" is changed to the name of the page to be linked. Smaug 21:47, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Some programming help needed

  • MediaWiki: 1.5.8
  • PHP: 4.4.0 (apache2handler)
  • MySQL: 3.23.58

For my wiki I would need some additional functions wich I hope could be possible via adding to the php code. Our users will use the wiki for their own different projects. I want them to have a way to decide if other users but them can edit their pages. We developed a "traffic light"-system for this using templates. "Green" meaning free to edit for anyone, "Yellow" please ask before editing, "Red" No editing. What would we need is the edit page to check if the "Red" template is present on a page, and if yes to not save any changes, unless the user editing is the user who first created the page. If the "Yellow" template is present in a page, the user who first created it (and that user only) should be able to revert that page.

Is this somehow possible?

—217.94.251.162 06:31, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] LDAP Groups in Wiki

  • MediaWiki: 1.11.1
  • PHP: 5.2.5
  • MySQL: 5.0.45
  • URL:

The issue we are having pertains to group access in the wiki. The code that we have lets users log in with there LDAP credentials; which is what we want. We want everyone who has a logon for our domain to have access to the information. The part that we can't get to work is we only want one group in AD to be able to edit the information on the wiki. As it stands anyone that can sign in can edit and add pages. This is the code that we are currently using. We are all new PHP so some of the code may be incorrect.

$wgLDAPGroupUseRetrievedUsername = array(
"domain"=>true
);
$wgLDAPGroupObjectclass = array(
"domain"=>"group"
);
$wgLDAPGroupAttribute = array(
"domain"=>"member"
);
$wgLDAPGroupNameAttribute = array(
"domain"=>"cn"
);
$wgLDAPRequiredGroups = array(
"domain"=> array("AD group name")
);
$wgLDAPUseLDAPGroups = array(
"domain"=>true
);
$wgLDAPGroupsPrevail = array(
"domain"=>false
);
$wgLDAPGroupSearchNestedGroups = array(
"domain"=>true
);
$wgLDAPRetrievePrefs = array(
"domain"=>true
);

We have commented out $wgLDAPRequiredGroups, it makes the code fail when we let it run.

—198.182.163.125 18:11, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Highly Available Wiki System

  • MediaWiki: 1.11.1 (latest)
  • PHP: 5
  • MySQL: 5.0
  • URL: (internal)

I am trying to use loadbalancing to create a highly available Wiki system. My idea is to have the wiki write to a master and read from a slave. This way, when the master fails, it can still keep on reading of the slave.

I edited the setup.php and DefaultSettings.php and added the correct values to use multiple servers, but when the master goes down, it doesn't read from the slave, it keeps on trying to go to the master...

Thanks in advance !

EDIT: It seems that when the master is up, the wiki IS conneting to the slave... Problem is that when the master goes down, the wiki crashes (which it shouldn't, it should just read from the slave)

—213.193.161.137 13:25, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

See Category:Database variables and particularly Manual:$wgDBservers. Try connecting to your slave server manually and test if it contains the proper data etc. Also it's bad practice to change codebase files, you should do all configuration from LocalSettings.php. --Nad 21:10, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply ! Well, I followed the manual of wgDBservers, and edited the values that are there ! When I manually connect, the slave responds and all of the data that should be there, is there :-)

If the slave is synchronising ok, then I don't know. All I can suggest is to analyse what's happening when it crashes. I.e are there any errors logged? is it timing out? etc --Nad 22:55, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, I took the following steps:

-Edited the files according to the manual (change $wgDBservers to true and added the server to the server array).

-Set up a MySQL-master-slave replication (outside of MediaWiki, or is MediaWiki supposed to do this itself?)

Also, the slave IS NOT down, MediaWiki just doesn't seem to want to connect to it when the master goes down... I now put the following code in the LocalSettings.php and restored the other files to default...

$wgDBservers=true;
 
$wgMasterWaitTimeOut=1;
 
$wgClusterTimeOut=1;
 
$wgDBerrorlog="/var/log/wiki/dberrors.log";
 
$wgDBservers = array(
array(
::'host'=> "192.168.2.150",
::'user' => "user",
::'password' => "password",
::'dbname' => "wiki",
::'type' => "mysql",
::'load' => 0
),
array(
::'host'=> "127.0.0.1",
::'user' => "user",
::'password' => "password",
::'dbname' => "wiki",
::'type' => "mysql",
::'load' => 1
));

When I put the master down, I get the following errorcode:

"Lost connection to MySQLServer during query (192.168.2.150))"

Thanks for your interest btw :) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] ([[User talk:{{{1}}}|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/{{{1}}}|contribs]]) . Please sign your posts with ~~~~!

I believe that MediaWiki still needs to write (such as page hits) this means that even though it is reading data from the DB... when it tries to write you page hit (or other data) it fails because it can not find your Write Database

[edit] Category page, contents breakdown

Cripes - what a load of text to wade through just to make a help desk request! I don't think any of it was relevant, so I deleted it all.

Here is my (version and platform independent) problem;

By default, pages in a category are broken down by the first letter of the page title (or the first letter of the category index) on the page for the category. i.e.

A
  A page
  A page by any other name
  Another page
  Annex
  All pages
B
  Because
  Become
  By the way
...

To change that behaviour, for example to break down pages by the first two letters of the page title (or the category index), i.e.

A
  A page
  A page by any other name
An
  Another page
  Annex
Al
  All pages
Be
  Because
  Become
By
  By the way
...

Should I,

  1. Add a magic word to the category page,
  2. tweek a global parameter setting somewhere,
  3. install an extension,
  4. hack the source code,
  5. all of the above?

Thanks for help ppl. --Dmb 08:31, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Well dude, you could hack the 'firstChar' function in ./languages/Language.php - it seems that the only code to use this function is exactly the call under ./includes/CategoryPage.php that you want to hack. Try to substitute this code, and you will see double character category indexing;
/**
         * Get the first character of a string. 
         *
         * @param string $s
         * @return string
         */
        function firstChar( $s ) {
                $matches = array();
                preg_match( '/^([\x00-\x7f]|[\xc0-\xdf][\x80-\xbf]|' .
                '[\xe0-\xef][\x80-\xbf]{2}|[\xf0-\xf7][\x80-\xbf]{3})([\x00-\x7f]|[\xc0-\xdf][\x80-\xbf]|' .
                '[\xe0-\xef][\x80-\xbf]{2}|[\xf0-\xf7][\x80-\xbf]{3})/', $s, $matches);

                return isset( $matches[1] ) ? $matches[1]. $matches[2] : "";
        }

Of course you should probably rename that function, and add an option to activate this behaviour somehow. --Dmb 13:19, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

OK, now I have renamed the above function 'firstTwoChar' (keeping firstChar as it was). The relevant line to edit in ./includes/CategoryPage.php is within the addPage function ...

$this->articles_start_char[] = $wgContLang->convert( $wgContLang->firstTwoChar( $sortkey ) );

Now we need to call that selectively in response to some option... Suggestions? --Dmb 13:36, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] After editing a section, browser returns editor to the top of the article not to the section

  • MediaWiki: 1.9.3
  • PHP: 5.2.5 (cgi-fcgi)
  • MySQL: 5.1.22-rc-community

The issue is this:

  • On Wikipedia:
    • I edit section X of an article
    • After I save, the browser keeps me on section X
  • On MediaWiki Sites that I administer:
    • I edit section X of an article
    • After I save, the browser returns me to the top of the article

This issue occurs on multiple wikis on multiple versions, so I don't think it is a versioning thing.

I want my Wikis to return to the proper section, like Wikipedia does... does anyone know how to do this? —Timneu22 14:28, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Trying to set the script up as a SubDomain

Hi, I am trying to get the wiki to work as wiki.mydomain.com rther then domain.com/wiki, Th problem im running into is that if you goto the wiki.mydomain (which points to public_html/wiki) it trys to send me to wiki.mydomain.com/wiki. If i edit localsettings.php so that it will try to redirect to "$wgScriptPath = ""; the page goes to text only.

Any advice on how i should edit it. or shall i start recoding it? (not sure if this is a common issue)

—90.242.137.6 10:32, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] URLs and Tables

  • MediaWiki: 1.11.0
  • PHP: 5.2.4
  • MySQL: 2.8.0.2
  • URL: