[Mediawiki-l] Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?

[Gary Kirk]

On 10/04/07, Monahon, Peter B. <Peter.Monahon at uspto.gov> wrote:
>
> > "Fred wrote: There are few things regarding
> > any open source software that can't be figured
> > out by using some creative googling. Fred
>
> Great speculation, Fred.  Yes, we Googled and found a *book* (no web
> sites) that at least one person on this list has used and found to be
> supportive of the types of inquiries and problems I shared:
>
>     http://www.packtpub.com/MediaWiki/book
>     "MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide"
>     by Mizanur Rahman.
>
> I'll let you all know how it works for me.  Thank you, Chad and Dave!
> Aside: Dave, "How can anyone be expected to run a catalog with 79 (!!!)
> different baseball cap styles?"
> to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle - see
> http://sanmar.com/sanmar-servlets/CatalogBrowser?v=new&id=126
>
> However, regarding the specific MediaWiki struggles I shared, I've found
> no satisfactory Google responses yet.  I said so in my first post, but
> the admin quashed it.  Too long?  Some other discomfort?  Who knows why
> my first post was rejected by the list-serve admin.  So, instead, I
> re-wrote a shorter inquiry.  Now, we can endlessly guess at what details
> I originally offered to share up front in this thread.  Any other
> guesses from others?
>
> Angela, Thank you very much for offering your experience and insight,
> details in response to the 4 samples of the type of challenges I'm
> experiences.  However, I either cannot even get to the screens you
> describe as working for you, or I cannot produce the results you imply
> should be available or that I want to accomplish.  I appreciate your
> trying, but short of on-site troubleshooting, I don't think either of us
> knows exactly where our attempt to coordinate goes awry.
>
> Here's an example of my frustration finding MediaWiki documentation:
> What are "Categories" and why?
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories is meaningless to me since
> it does not explain what [Category] is used for, how it works, what are
> it's features and benefits.  It's like teaching someone how to drive a
> car and explaining the steering wheel like this: "turn the steering
> wheel by rotating clockwise or anticlockwise".  Hello, isn't there
> something missing in that?  Such as: it's attached to a rolling car and
> you actually want to move forward or backward AND change general
> direction to get to a destination, probably on roads of some kind?  So,
> I'd like to know what I can do with Category schemes.  Can I easily
> design a Category scheme later in life and apply it with a macro,
> globally?  Or, do I have to manually categorize each page?  Can I
> categorize by selecting from a schematic clickable menu I build on my
> site?
>
> NOWHERE on that page (above) is there a link to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory and I would not have found
> more had I not exited from MediaWiki/WikiMedia altogether and wandered
> around Google a bit.  But, Fred, please note that the two Category
> articles I found here are TOTALLY UNRELATED to each other and absolutely
> no help in intelligently planning and building and maintaining and
> rebuilding a MediaWiki implementation using Categories.
>
> So, I search WITHIN Wikipedia for [how to use wiki categories] and it
> barfs up nothing, suggesting that I jump ship into Google or Yahoo
> search.  I graciously accept Google and find ...
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization  (which Wikipedia
> couldn't find on it's own?) which also leads me to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization_FAQ !
>
> I answer my own question:
>
> "No."
>
> Remember the question?
>
> "Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?"
>
> So, I'm printing my own, including further reading on Categories at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy ... this has  l-o-n-g  day written
> all over it!
>
> I'll read the book mentioned above and continue to print and read
> hundreds of web reference pages daily, and continue to develop, develop,
> develop.  My US TMEP Wiki Project is up to ~569,072 words, ~4,593
> [Edit]able headings, and it all fits on a 125mb USB flash drive WITH
> Apache, MySQL, PHP and more using WOS for development  (WOS from
> Cornelius Herzog at http://www.chsoftware.net/en, thank you very much)!
>
> - Peter Blaise
>
>
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>

Look at a random Wikipedia article to see categories 'in action.

I would hazard a guess that the reason Wikipedia's search didn't find
anything was because you did not elect to include the Wikipedia:
namespace in the search.

Please don't SHOUT, it only gets people's backs up. We're all, aside
from a select few, volunteers, and don't have to help you at all. The
text found when you type Special:Version into the search box and click
go says "MediaWiki is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details."
-- 
Gary Kirk