Topic on Project:Village Pump

Manual:Installation guide has one section with a 400 words summary, but then links to a "Main installation guide" composed of 4+4 more pages. None of these pages is translatable. Can we consolidate truly important information and make it translatable? Currently one is supposed to find the following logical steps.

1. Download
   • Download is the page
   • Template:DownloadMediaWiki duplicates most info
   • Download from Git is sometimes linked instead from docs
   • Manual:Installing_MediaWiki#Download_MediaWiki_software duplicates it again
   • Manual:Upgrading#Unpack_the_new_files again
2. Requirements
   • Manual:Installation requirements
   • Manual:Installation guide has a largely duplicative summary (which I've now transcluded in the former). Does the complete page really offer any additional value to users (as opposed to devs)?
   • Repeated in Manual:Upgrading#Check_requirements
   • Actual preparation of requirements: Manual:Installing_MediaWiki#Create_a_database takes most of the space in the guide.
3. The actual installation
   • Manual:Config script is the page (marked outdated!)
   • Manual:Upgrading#Web_browser repeats in part
4. Misc troubleshooting and alternatives if something went wrong
   • Manual:Chmod and
   • Manual:Installing_MediaWiki#Uploaded_files has some warnings and may be duplicative of Manual:Configuring file uploads
   • FAQ#Installation_and_configuration
   • Manual:Errors_and_Symptoms#Installation_Errors
   • Category:Installation
5. Configuration
   • Manual:Configuring MediaWiki or Manual:Configuration#Configuring MediaWiki (merge proposed)
   • A handful of pages linked from there for specific config issues like Manual:Short URL and Manual:Page customizations
   • More supposedly MediaWiki-specific server setup information, like Apache configuration, robots.txt, texvc, Comparison of extensions in distributions, ...
   • Manual:Performance tuning
   • Manual:Extensions
   • Other stuff indexed in Manual:System administration and Manual:LocalSettings.php
6. Maintenance
   • Manual:Upgrading: this is what most people forget to do, but the page is largely duplicative and doesn't make a compelling case for upgrading.
   • Manual:Administrators should be redirected to relevant help pages.
   • Manual:System administration which links 10 more manual pages not mentioned above.
7. Informative material
   • Manual:What is MediaWiki? (cf. the dev-oriented Principles)
   • Manual:MediaWiki feature list

The pages in bold are part of the official Template:InstallationNav (which complements Template:MediaWiki Introduction): they are supposed to be the official path and need special care and coordination.

Given Chad's comment, I'm also going to tag all "platform-specific" manual pages for merge to the main ones. Common parts can be merged and transcluded on the specific pages, while really platform-specific additional information can be left there. P.s.: for a start, I removed 5 guides on obsoleted systems and marked the others for merge.

Thank you for this!

I made Manual:LocalSettings.php translatable and expanded Manual:System administration by merging Manual:Configuration.

• Manual:System administration could be useful if it becomes a reasonable index/step by step guide/tutoring of the really important pages in Category:MediaWiki for site admins (allowing to remove respective information from the general installation manual), but I'm not sure of its current role.
• Manual:LocalSettings.php is very visited, but it's quite a mess. I doubt it kept anywhere close up to date, is it currently making a good service to users?

I wonder what's the purpose of making Manual:LocalSettings.php translatable if you doubt about the usefulness of that page or if you plan/propose to improve/restructure it.

The page is vastly correct and the strings contained in it look rather stable, so it's ok to translate it. It is my impression that some consolidation will be needed for that page (reducing total amount of text around), but not a rewriting.

I've tried to make the essential stuff transcludable, and I've trimmed some more pages.

IMHO the direction is rather clear:

• always defer to other sites for guides on how to set up PHP etc.;
• keep all the steps internal to MediaWiki (like installer, config script, LocalSettings.php) in their own, shared manual pages;
• in all the setup-specific pages, just transclude the former and maintain only:
  • information on packages available and how to use them (debatable, should be on their sites whenever possibles),
  • OS-specific instructions which can't be found anywhere else, like specific paths to put in MediaWiki config or RAM/suhosin requirements and the like.

Please, can someone give consideration to Raspberry PI 3, Raspbian GNU/Linux 9, LAMP. Where due to some GNU license issue, mySQL redirects to MariaDB. Need to know how to get superuser on phpMyAdmin (the commands given are for mySQL, and are not the right format for MariaDB. There is no password for root initially for MariaDB, but no direct relationship (it seems) between MariaDB and phpMyAdmin. Might be proven wrong here once I start creating databases in MariaDB.

However this really good documentation, it just doesn't go far enough. Thanks.

Looks like your question is about MariaDB/phpMyadmin, not MediaWiki. Have you tried asking on a mariaDB forum or stackoverflow?

I've added a solution to MariaDB password problem - which hit me as well on Raspbian

Install to the correct directory to avoid SELinux issues. Placing the content under /var/www/html (or /opt/rh/httpd24/root/var/www/html/ for httpd24) instead of just /var/www will automatically provide the correct SELinux context.

Do not forget to change the owner and group of the content tree with 'chown -R apache: mediawiki/'