Tips and Tricks for MediaWiki, incl. Math, Date/Time

Date and time

Click here to go to the next tab... Example:

CURRENTYEAR is 2026, CURRENTTIME is 04:17, LOCALTIME is 04:17
date: 25 December 2009 or "now": 16 Sep 2026
Revision: 09.2026
DueDate used for Master thesis delivery, Due_date used for project and other deliverables

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words

<span style="float: right; font-size: 80%; font-weight: bold;" > {{REVISIONMONTH}}.{{REVISIONYEAR}}  </span>
{{#formatdate:dec 25,2009|dmy}}

see also Template:Right, Right80, Small text, Large text, text Colour: blue text , red text ,

{{Colour|blue|blue text }}, {{Colour|red|red text }}, {{Large|Large text}}

see more in Ask...

Math

 <math> x^2 + y^2 = z^2 </math>

$x^{2} + y^{2} = z^{2}$

for easy text formatting, you can also use the NO<sub>2</sub> writing, which provides NO₂.

Header Tabs

put the word <headertabs/> at the end of the part which is separated in Tabs, and then header 1 will be converted into a tab.

TOC, Style and Images

Style

__NOTOC__ eller {{TOCright}}
__NOEDITSECTION__

<span style="float: right; font-size: 80%;" > your text here </span>
<br/>
<span style="background-color: #ffffcc" > need documentation here </span>

NOTITLE on pages is achieved by: (see Template:Lecture)

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="position: absolute; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);">{{FULLPAGENAME}}</span>}}

Span style attributes

text-align:center; # note: centered text through

centered

background:color:#ffffee
font-weight: bold;

Images

right flow, 350 px, with frame and caption

[[File:image.png|350px|frame|Caption of image|link=http://cwi.unik.no/wiki/UNIK4700]]

external images, just include the http link

http://www.unik.no/Images/Logo.gif http://www.unik.no/Images/Logo.gif

References

<ref>   </ref> and or <ref name="Noll2015">
<references />

The first part will just include a reference, the second one with the name= ... is used to label the references. Multiple use of references is used by

 <ref name="Noll2015"/>

. You may also group references for sorting after e.g. footnotes and references. a good method for the summary is the use of the template

  {{Reflist}}

For further reading, see: Extension:Cite

Miniature of pages

http://www.robothumb.com/src/http://www.monsite.fr@160x120.jpg

http://www.robothumb.com/src/http://wiki.unik.no@320x240.jpg

show command: ....

Slideshow

Ask on courses in Slideshow mode (other parameters: limit = 10)

External Images

enabled, use the following for adding a caption

{|
| <image URL>
|-
| caption
|}

sub-pages, inclusion

a sub-page is a child page to a topic, example UNIK4700/Introduction, where introduction is a sub-page of UNIK4700. The feature is currently not implemented on this wiki, mainly due to (i) don't know how to create and (ii) don't know how to query. Need to look into it.

Create: by adding “query string=super_page=Research” to the form.
a good article on search in sub-pages and omnitting the "main" page:

http://clkoerner.com/2012/09/06/semantic-mediawiki-templates-and-arraymaps-are-awesome/

Look also for ParserFunctions extension, they allow to give back parts of the header

Rather use inclusion of other pages, either through

{{Assignments}} calling the Template:Assignments or through
{{:Unik4700:Assignments}} including page UNIK4700:Assignments

Collapsing

Collapsing a section[Show/hide]

this is the text for Section 1

and more text

Collapsing tables

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Collapsing

Winter Olympic Games
	City	Country
1994	Lillehammer	Norway
1998	Nagano	Japan

Semantic Bundle

3Jan2012 tried compilation again, having renamed SemanticBundle to semantic-bundle
sudo make all worked
failed at the end, 7z not found, but SemanticBundle-20130103.tgz was created > moved to extensions > tar xvf SemanticBundle-20130103.tgz > created "all extensions"
- SemanticResultFormats
- SemanticSignup
- SemanticTasks
- SemanticWatchlist
- SemanticDrilldown
- ...
- Widgests
- Maps
- Nuke
- PageSchemas
- ParserFunctions

Activated through

$ pwd
/var/www/mediawiki/extensions/semantic-bundle
$ sudo vi SemanticBundle.php
$ sudo cp SemanticBundleSettings.sample.php SemanticBundleSettings.php
$ sudo vi SemanticBundleSettings.php
$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data *

Widgets

See a list of Widgets used on this wiki

YouTube widget

{{#widget:WidgetName|param1=value1|param2=value2}}
{{#widget:YouTube|id=DWef69ItVrU}}

id - video id (from the URL)
playlist - playlist name (starts with PL) - first clip is played (id is ignored)
height and width define view dimensions, 420x350 is default

other widgets: mediawiki widgets

LinkedIN widget: Test_LinkedIn_Profile
Youtube: YouTubeWidget-test

Language

We are using the the specific ending /NO for a norwegian page of an existing pagename, and the flag, check http://BasicInternet.org

depreciated 29Jan2014: Language settings is not working - after upgrade to Mediawiki 1.22.1 14Feb2013: playing with language functions to test en/no implementation

Don't forget to run a "page refresh" (as cache is enabled)

{{#iflang: no |
 dette er en norsk tekst 
 }}
 {{#iflang: en | 
 Secret stuff for english speakers 
 }}
 Here's a bilingual header.
  =={{#iflang: en |English heading }}{{#ifmultlang: }}{{#iflang: no |Norsk titel }}==

{{#iflang: no |Dette er en norsk tekst

Og her kommer en header på norsk}} {{#iflang: en |Secret stuff for english speakers

this is a header in English}} =={{#iflang: en |English heading }}{{#iflang: no |Norsk titel }}==

Buttons

So for meetings you use the following: {{#formlink:form=Meeting|link text=Add a meeting|link type=button|namespace=Basic Internet}}

This gives you an Add a meeting button.

The one step process is useful because you can also pass values into the form. For example, if you are creating a meeting from within a project page, you could pass the project value in automatically by adding to the Project template: {{#formlink:form=Meeting|link text=Add a meeting|link type=button|namespace=Basic Internet|query string=Meeting[Project]={{PAGENAME}}}}

I would also add another category to the Meetings e.g. [[Category:Basic Internet Meetings]] ". You can then easily query them. You can also do clever things like assign the category using the parameter passing above. So you can start categorising the meetings based on where in the site they are created.

Add-on functionality

before you continue, check SemanticBundle options
look at http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:MediaWiki_extensions
Pre-defined widgets from: http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AllPages&from=&namespace=274

All messages and how to set them Special:AllMessages

SimpleSecurity - removed error message MediaWiki:Security-info (left as blank page)

Dynamic pages

Using the inclusion of Special:RecentChanges or Special:Newpages for recent changes

List of abbreviations:

N: This edit created a new page (also see list of new pages)
m: This is a minor edit
b: This edit was performed by a bot
(±123): The page size changed by this number of bytes

14 September 2026

08:00

Deletion log Josef.noll talk contribs deleted page Test area (content was: "{{Area |Area=IoPTS and more }}", and the only contributor was "[[Special:Contributions/imported>Josef.Noll|imported>Josef.Noll]]" ([[User talk:imported>Josef.Noll|talk]]))

07:59

Societal Security diffhist 0 Josef.noll talk contribs

or

Inclusion of pages works shrough {{:Name_of_page}} for pages from the main namespace, otherwise from Template:Name_of_page

Links to changes - % why don't they work? - Links work in MediaWiki:Sidebar

currentevents-url|currentevents
recentchanges-url|Recent changes
randompage-url|randompage
TrackRecord|TrackChanges

See Talk:MediaWiki Tips for information on dynamic sidebars

Interworking Wordpress

Nicely described by Chris Koerner in using the MediaWiki environment that we use to document stuff.¹ Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to leverage the MediaWiki API and the External Data Extension to manipulate data from external sources and content within the wiki. http://clkoerner.com/tag/mediawiki/

Footer

Combine the footer with the semantic bottrom

To put this into your other skins you will need to copy the iotsec_footer and bif_footer CSS from /var/www/mediawiki/skins/iotsec_template.css to the corresponding file in the other skins.

Then you need to add:

<css>.catlinks {display:none}<css/>

to the templates where you want to have the new footer box.

Design

Mediawiki Design lists cool designs suggestions. We are using the Chameleon skin. Our earlier GuMax skin w\hampered the upgrade of the wiki