Academic hub

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Academic wikis are third-party wikis meant to be used in an academic context with a greater emphasis on features like access control, content approval, and research analysis.

For other third-party uses of MediaWiki, please see Sysadmin hub.

Knowledge Sharing

Many academic wikis are using Extension:Semantic MediaWiki and leveraging the semantic web to share data. The MediaWiki API can also be used to mine data from other sites; combined with an scheduler program like Cron this can lead to semi-automated data distribution.

Access Control

Account Creation

Vampire Model

The vampire model consists of two rules:

only registered users may edit
only registered users may create accounts

This method of account-creation removes the burden of making all accounts from single user/admin, this greatly simplifies matters. Because trust of peers is relatively high in an academic setting, a single account can be made for a P.I., who then can make accounts for their students. Because MediaWiki logs all account activity it is (relatively) easy to track accountability for creation of spam/bot accounts.

Authentication

Extension:LDAPAuthentication2: Leverage an existing LDAP (including Microsoft Active Directory, Kerberos) as a single sign-on

Authorization

Content security

Extension:AccessControl: Collaboration with commercial entities on academic projects, may require site content security. This extension has been created for this purpose.

Document Management

Editing

Extension:ParserFunctions: Bundled with core, required for complex templating including most WP templates.
Extension:Scribunto: Bundled with core, required for especially complex templating including many WP templates.
Extension:WikiEditor: Bundled with core, 2010-era wikitext editor sponsored by Wikimedia.
Vector: A Polished skin for MediaWiki that comes bundled by default.
Extension:Cite: Bundled with core, displays citations to show where information originated. This is particularly useful when merging data from a single document on multiple wiki pages to indicate why the information is authoritative.

Navigation & Search

Extension:BreadCrumbs2

Navigation aid when traversing the wiki, usually used to display and highlight a category hierarchy.

Extension:CategoryTree

Improve category listings with counters for contained pages of sub-categories.

Extension:SphinxSearch

An alternative to the default search engine, lightweight but allowing more robust indexing of content through the third-party Sphinx engine.

Alternatives:

Extension:CirrusSearch

Extension:Semantic MediaWiki

Allows you to add meta data to content in wiki articles and providing a query language for dynamically retrieving content including properties and lists of articles.