Project:Support desk

Welcome to the MediaWiki Support desk. This is a place where you can ask any questions you have about installing, using or administrating the MediaWiki software.

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See also

• Other places to ask for help

Before you post

• Check the FAQ and Errors and symptoms .
• If your question is about a specific feature, check the relevant technical manual , end-user help or extension page and consider asking on its talk page .
• For issues about the mediawiki.org website, report to Village Pump instead.
• Ask technical questions about Wikimedia websites on meta:Tech instead.

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1. To help us answer your questions, please indicate which version of MediaWiki you are using, as found on your wiki's Special:Version page:
2. If possible, add $wgShowExceptionDetails = true;error_reporting( -1 );ini_set( 'display_errors', 1 ); to LocalSettings.php in order to make MediaWiki show more detailed error messages.
3. Please include the web address (URL) to your wiki if possible. It's often easier for us to identify the source of the problem if we can see the error directly.
4. To start a new thread, click the box with the text "Start a new topic".

Hello! My wiki's name is quite long (Craighead County History). The sitename overlaps with the search bar. How can I fix this? This wiki is hosted by Miraheze, if that information is helpful.

🫀😍💖🥰

You should contact Miraheze about issues on wikis hosted by them.

Hello !

I want to save an article with the most common Free and Open Source Software file extension I know of, which is ODT.

I want ODT and not PDF so the file would be easily editable from any common rich text editor.

Wikipedia only allows me to save an article as a webpage or as a PDF file, even for a printable version, hence I ask:

How to save a Wikipedia article as an ODT file?

No conversions, no complex tasks, just simply saving a printable version (in HTML) to an ODT (in XML).

Thank you !

He querido actualizar mi wiki de la versión 1.34.0 a la versión 1.42.1 y para hacerlo hice una actualización intermedia a la versión 1.39.8 como se recomienda en el manual de actualización. Al hacerlo encuentro que las páginas cuyo nombre contiene tildes, diéresis, ñ o caracteres similares aparecen vacías o sus links de entrada no aparecen en las listas.

Esta es la dirección de mi Wiki:

http://wiki.neotropicos.org/index.php?title=Portada

El problema se puede visualizar en la columna de la izquierda en los links Bibliografía y Topónimos que contienen tildes y dentro del Glosario los vínculos que presentan este problema no aparecen. Sólo aparece la viñeta. Cómo puedo solucionarlo?

____________________________

I wanted to update my wiki from version 1.34.0 to version 1.42.1 and to do so I did an intermediate update to version 1.39.8 as recommended in the update manual. When I did so I found that pages whose names contain accents, umlauts, ñ or similar characters appear empty or their entry links do not appear in the lists.

This is the address of my Wiki:

http://wiki.neotropicos.org/index.php?title=Homepage

The problem can be seen in the left column in the Bibliography and Toponyms links that contain accents and within the Glossary the links that present this problem do not appear. Only the bullet appears. How can I solve it?

Cannot reproduce. All accents appear in "Topónimos" and "Bibliografía". Using Firefox 131 on Linux. Do you have broken fonts installed on your system, maybe?

The fonts are installed correctly. The problem is only with links whose name contains accents, "ñ" or similar characters.

I can add a message to editors at MediaWiki:Editnotice-0 but in Visual Editor it's headed by 'notice 1'. How to remove this, to have only the plain message?

Delete the message: MediaWiki:Visualeditor-editnotices-tool

I am trying to extract the text of the articles from a damaged database. My database does not have users table and other last tables (in alphabetical order) i.e. user, user_autocreate_serial, user_former_groups, user_groups, user_newtalk, user_properties, watchlist, watchlist_expiry. I don't care about the user now, I just want the current text of articles attributed to mediawiki default user. Is there a way to do that?

Does https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Page_table#Listing_pages_and_relations_with_other_essential_tables help?

Even after LocalSettings.php has been put inside the mediawiki-1.42.3 directory it still says that it is not found; why?

The problem with this is that you are not in the right directory. Assuming you are on Linux, it should be in "/var/www/html/wiki". The mediawiki-1.42.3 directory is just the downloaded file, not the actual installation.

Hello. Thank you for responding to my question. I am not sure which other directory exists other than the one I put LocalSettings.php in, because inside it there is also index.php, mw-config, maintence etc. The reason for it being called mediawiki-1.42.3 is because I didn't rename it after installation.

second post on here in four hours but the recent changes on my wiki only ever returns a HTTP200 when it checks if there has been any recent changes

on other wikis it will return a HTTP204 until there has been a new change that isn't displayed

no clue why this happens so any input is appreciated

I assume you mean with the peek url parameter?

It could be due to something with your webserver or proxies between webserver. Hard to say for sure.

I'm sure I'm not the first to have this issue, but I couldn't find the info I need in FAQs. I'm in the process of setting up a Wiki at knowledge.reconnect.org.uk, I'm currently mostly installing extensions etc. before posting the initial pages that are currently in desktop files that will need editing. All was going well until I attempted another update via http://knowledge.reconnect.org.uk/mw-config/index.php. I got the error message "Your session data was lost! Check your php.ini and make sure session.save_path is set to an appropriate directory." How do I resolve this? I have MediaWiki 1.40.1 installed.

So, did you

Check your php.ini and make sure session.save_path is set to an appropriate directory.

?

The error message indicates that the session data can not be stored. This may be related to the mentioned configuration. There is also Manual:$wgSessionCacheType which may contain useful information, but I don't think it really applies to the web installer.

Hi Osnard, thanks for your quick response. Unfortunately, I don't currently have command line access - but that will get sorted in the next 24 hours. Perhaps I just need to wait for that?! I don't understand why the problem suddenly appeared, I was just setting up the ConfirmEdit Extension... as soon as I can, I'll check php.ini and post what I find here. Hopefully it'll be a solution. Thanks!

I got command access and it all seemed OK. My wiki was also all working fine. I then discovered I was making a stupid mistake! I'd set up a bookmark to access my update page at knowledge.reconnect.org.uk/mw-config/index.php but prefixed it with http:// instead of https://...

my special pages have a different format to the default and i have no clue why

e.g. Special:EmailUser?wpTarget=TargetUsername does not work, but Special:EmailUser/TargetUsername does work

idk if it's relevant but below is the path setup

$wgScriptPath = "";

$wgScriptExtension = "$wgScriptPath/index.php";

$wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1";

$wgUsePathInfo = true;

foreach ($actions as $action) {

  $wgActionPaths[$action] = "$wgArticlePath/$action";

}

$wgActionPaths["view"] = "/wiki/$1";

$wgActionPaths["rollback"] = "/index.php?title=$1&action=rollback";

After updating from 1.39 to 1.42.3 all pages with categories have the same problem:

When I open the page in the Visual Editor the existing categories are shown in the category box at the bottom of the page as red links with these urls; Index.php?title=Category:category name].

If I leave it like that then after saving the page that url shows up at the bottom of the page text and the page no longer has any categories.

If I use the Source Editor instead everything is fine and the category shows up between double brackets.

The steps I took to update:

I uploaded the 1.42.3 zip to the server, had it unzipped to a new directory. I downloaded the latest versions for LabeledSectionTransclusion and Popups and uploaded those to the Extensions folder in the new directory.

I renamed the 1.39 folder to another name and then renamed the 1.42.3 folder to the regular wiki name. Then I ran the update script.

I opened the wiki main page and then saw I forgot to copy the images directory to the new folder, which is what I did next. I then reloaded the main page and everything looked fine.

The first time I edited a page I didn't notice the error at the bottom but after saving I saw what happened and from then on it became clear this is happening every time now.

I've tested by disabling all the extensions except for the editors to see if any of those could be the culprit but I keep getting the same issue.

These are the normally enabled extensions:

wfLoadExtension( 'CodeEditor' );

wfLoadExtension( 'LabeledSectionTransclusion' );

wfLoadExtension( 'PageImages' );

wfLoadExtension( 'ParserFunctions' );

wfLoadExtension( 'Popups' );

wfLoadExtension( 'TextExtracts' );

wfLoadExtension( 'VisualEditor' );

wfLoadExtension( 'WikiEditor' );

I did find the following in the release notes for 1.42:

ParserOutput::getCategories(), deprecated in 1.40, has been removed. You should use ::getCategoryNames() and ::getCategorySortKey() instead.

Maybe that is related but I don't understand how it could be as all the other extensions except for the two mentioned above come bundled with the latest version and should be compatible, one would think.

Could it be something needs to be added or removed from LocalSettings?

I'd love to know what the fix for this is as I used categories on all pages.

Thanks!