Exterior Memory:Configuration

This article gives on overview of the configuration of the MindMaster wiki.

Security and Monitoring
Every public interactive website (forum, wiki) suffers the same problem: vandalism, usually in the form of spam.

There are two ways to fight this problem:
 * Revoke permissions to make it harder for scripts to make modifications. Unfortunately, this also makes it harder for genuine users to make modifications as well.
 * Monitor changes closely, and revert vandalism.

Permissions and Authorization generally involves users to
 * solve a CAPTCHA (small puzzle of recognition of deformed text),
 * sign-up (register an account),
 * confirm an e-mail address,
 * or even manual authorization of the account by the wiki maintainer.
 * restrictions who may edit, create, delete, move article, possible different for each namespace (for example, this wiki restricts viewing permissions in the configuration namespace).

Monitoring can involve:
 * Reviewing and approving edits (patrolling)
 * Sent an e-mail alert when a new user registers an account
 * Sent an e-mail alert when a page is created, edited or deleted.

This wiki currently relies on monitoring, and only allows editing of pages in the Main and Talk namespaces by registered users who confirmed their e-mail address. I may loosen the restrictions when other people show involvement, or tighten the restrictions when these pages gets spammed.

Search
The default search option in MediaWiki uses MySQL full text search, and is pretty lousy.


 * As a workaround, you can tune MediaWiki to search words of 2 or 3 characters
 * Alternatively, you can install another search extension, such as Sphinx or MWSearch.

Additional namespaces
This wiki features a few additional namespaces:
 * Config: Configuration of my network and computers. Not viewable by others.
 * Code: Source code. I still don't think this is the ideal way to make small scripts available to the public at large.
 * Opinion: Some rants, which I rather put down here then on a blog. Currently empty.

It is easy enough to configure additional namespaces. See $wgExtraNamespaces and don't forget about the $wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault.

Better Markup
MediaWiki developed it's own custom formatting plan to translate plain text to formatted text. Of course, there are many more markup languages. Styled Text Formatting lists just nine of them.

Unfortunately, the following markup is very unusual, and it is desirable to get a more common markup style:

I have not yet investigated how to achieve this.

Additional Extensions
The following extensions are installed:
 * ConfirmEdit:Simple captcha implementation, see Exterior Memory:Permissions Configuration
 * Lockdown:Per-namespace group permissions, see Exterior Memory:Permissions Configuration. While $wgNamespaceProtection allows per-namespace group permissions as well, it only restricts editing, but I also want to restrict viewing of pages.
 * New User Email Notification:Sends e-mail notification when user accounts are created. Not to be confused with another extension by the same name. See Exterior Memory:Monitoring Configuration.

Disabled
The following extensions are still disabled, but may be enabled later on:


 * SQL QueryTag:Display a SQL database query. This is still disabled for security reasons.
 * Semantic MediaWiki extension:Semantic Wiki extension, which allows you to add triplet statements in the code. Unlike the stand-along stand-alone OntoWiki, the underlying structure of the wiki does not change. I have not yet decided how and why I want to use this, so this is not yet installed.

Layout
I intend to tune the layout even more. Paul Gu has some great additional MediaWiki skins.