Kai Hendry wrote:

I have a couple of problems from a default debian mediawiki install. Debian packagers seem to think it is an upstream problem, so here I am relaying the message.

First problem was with the missing Help:Editing page.

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-mediawiki-devel/2005-September/...

There is no in-wiki end-user documentation shipped with the wiki so far. Perhaps someday there will be, but there is none now. Only a brief paragraph is added to the main page at installation.

And crufty URLs with "index.php".

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-mediawiki-devel/2005-September/...

You should never, ever put a virtual wiki directory at the web root, as has been explained here numerous times. To summarize: * It blocks and interferes with standard web items such as robots.txt and favicon.ico * It blocks and interferes with components of the wiki (scripts, CSS, images) * It blocks and interferes with everything else on your entire website * If you make special exceptions for the above it blocks out entire page titles from being usable in your wiki.

If that doesn't discourage you and you decide to set up rewrite rules for that, note that some people also try to eliminate the distinct script prefix from dynamic action URLs, such as editing. You should absolutely not do that as it has additional problems: * No way to block dynamic addresses with robots.txt, so you will receive much more crawler load on your server * People doing this often disable a security protection for action=raw, opening a serious cross-site scripting vulnerability for anyone visiting the site in Internet Explorer.

If you just want something prettier than 'index.php', then set up a default alias (if you're able to configure the Apache configuration) and change $wgArticlePath in LocalSettings.php to match. The defaults in the installer are designed primarily for compatibility.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)