Gentlemen, I am very thankful for http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_Git however it assumes one wants to 'get involved' with MediaWiki, whereas all I want to do is 'rsync snapshots' of the same files 'that the tarballs contain'. I.e., I just want to oh, every few days update (overwrite in place) my running copy of MediaWiki. No need for the history etc. that a 'clone' pulls in, or further 'pull's refresh. (The disk size I use should not grow a single bit between updates unless you upstream added some lines to a file.)
So it would be nice if someone mentioned the commands necessary so I can add them to that article. Let's pretend we are starting fresh (and not from SVN like in http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-February/058190.html .)