On 8/13/2010 12:24 PM, Chuck Carson wrote:

I played around with trying to manually upload images and documents (like pdf’s) to my wiki server and referencing them like so: [[media:example.pdf]]

I could not for the life of me figure out that directory is was looking for these in.. When I enabled file uploads and uploaded a file that way, it would then resolve correctly.

Can you manually upload content and if so, what directory does it look in?

When you upload a file through the File Upload interface, it is doing more than just placing the file on the server. It is also recording information about the file in the database. This information is what allows mediawiki to transform [[media:example.pdf]] into a link to the actual file.

For details of where files go, see this page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgHashedUploadDirectory

So, while you **can** upload files manually via ftp or better yet scp, it's certainly not recommended and isn't a very good way to get files onto your wiki. If you need to upload a whole bunch of files, you're (much) better off using the maintenance/importImages.php script.