[Mediawiki-l] understanding shared uploads

[Hugh Prior]

I am trying to create a 3-wiki site, http://www.treekee.com where each wiki 
is a separate language, and I would like to have a single place to keep all 
images.  I have read the pages on mediawiki.org about shared upload 
directories, for example:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:%24wgSharedUploadDirectory

What I don't quite understand is: do I need to allow each site to have 
access to each others directories?  That is, must I set up apache for each 
site to point to a root which will include each of the other sites?

Let me try and explain.  Please try and follow!  I will show the current 
setup with two languages, en and fr.

Each wiki is defined in the "w" directory below for the given language:
/tee/
/tee/en/
/tee/en/w/
/tee/fr/
/tee/fr/w/

The web server is told that the directory root for that website is the 
language directory, i.e.
http://en.treekee.com/ has the root directory "/tee/en" (I actually redirect 
here with an .htaccess file from "w" to "wiki")
http://fr.treekee.com/ has the root directory "/tee/fr"

Now, I imagine, that a shared directory should be something like:
/tee/shared/

HOWEVER, and this is the question, how can I give each of the sites access 
to this?  I cannot simply say that the directory is "/tee/shared/" since to 
the "en.treekee.com" website the root directory is "en" and cannot go higher 
in the directory structure.  It will not be allowed access to a directory 
outside its root.

Do I therefore have to say that each site has the root directory "tee" and 
within that set things up so that the index.php file is found in, for 
example, "tee/en/w".

Thanks for any help on this.


Hugh