MediaWiki

MediaWiki is an application written in .php. It is " ... the underlying open source wiki engine..." for Wikipedia and WikiMedia, which again are two websites running on MediaWiki. MediaWiki is developed on SourceForge by a foundation of voluntary developers: the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., which is a non-profit foundation registered in Florida.

MediaWiki was adopted by staff at Oslo University College (OUC), the Faculty of Engineering/Computer Science in the winter of 2005 and set up on a Linux server. It supports version control (cvs) but uses Subversion which is said to be a better and more stable cvs mechanism than cvs as such. Our version of MediaWiki uses an Apache server and a MySQL database. It also supports the use of mathematical and scientific formulae and equations by means of LaTex which has been integrated. Although MediaWiki is basically a file system, it may in its current version be used by students in a number of subjects. Classfronter - in comparison - has no adequate support for mathematical equations yet and is therefore not used in subjects that need this kind of functionality.

Version Control

Like most other wikis, our application shows the history of document in the sense that all changes made to a document can be seen. The name of the author of changes made and the time when they were made are also shown. It is therefore easy to retrieve previous deletions and reinstall them in a document.

(La)Tex and support for mathematical formulae

MediaWiki has a simple and easy to use editor into which (La)TeX markup may be integrated for the rendering of mathematical formulae. TeX uses a validator and converter - Texvc - which is a program that validates LaTeX math expressions and converts them to HTML or PNG images. Integrating ImageMagick and Ghostscript into Texvc will convert LaTeX's output to PNGs. TeX consequently generates either PNG images or simple HTML markup, depending on user preferences and the complexity of the expression. As the PNG graphics render the formulae in an 'easier-to-read' manner, most users will prefer this. Math markup goes inside <math> ... </math> tags. The edit toolbar has a button for this.

For examples of the rendering in HTML mode or as a PNG image, see the table in the Wikimedia/Meta-Wiki sites: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Editing_mathematical_formulae:TeX_markup and in http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing

For more information about Texvc, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texvc and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Texvc

MediaWiki at our faculty

MediaWiki was set up on our faculty server in February 2005 and introduced to our colleagues in various informal seminars throughout March and April the same year. The URL to the website is: http://project.iu.hio.no/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

The website is open, but only registered users may edit the files on the site. On the website a link called Innspill was inserted so as give our colleagues access to documents that briefly explained the main points of how to use TeX. The intention was to raise their interest in experimenting with the wiki so as to find out if it could be used in subjects like mathematics and chemistry. They were also encouraged to post their views and comments in a 'discussion' page on the site.

However, at the moment of writing - 26 April 2005 - no views or comments have been posted, and it seems as if no colleagues have tried out the maths functionalities.