For opensuse I've developed scripts which allows simple installation and updates of several mediawiki instances. You could have a look at the scripts in https://build.opensuse.org/stage/package/files?package=mediawiki&project...
There is makealias.sh, which builds up a symlinked structure and suggests an apache configuration (based on mediawiki's short urls. The suggested config also tries to seperate the individual installations completly by setting some php-parameters. All created wikis are listed in /etc/mediawiki-installations to be used by update.sh which incorporates the single updates and some service-works, depending on the version upgrades.
There are no patches needed to operate the wiki (there is only one patch for an upload problem included, which should be removed when I'm updateing to release 1.20).
Johannes