mediawiki on River Writes - A MediaWiki Blog

Multi-instance templates and var_final

river — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:10:13 +0000

A slightly awful way of doing things that’s more novelty than practical. Please don’t kill me

Glossary of ambiguous terms

river — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:21:00 +0000

Template and Preload are different, as are Widget, Module, and Gadget. Here’s a small glossary

How to see your template edits in action

river — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 18:27:36 +0000

When you edit a template, you will need to bypass cache somehow to see the effect of that edit on a content page

The Tag That Shall Not Be Named

river — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 01:31:04 +0000

A quick post about transclusion, partial transclusion, The Tag That Shall Not Be Named, and whitespace

How to refresh cache in MediaWiki

river — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 06:19:54 +0000

Caching can be super complicated in MediaWiki because there are many different types of cache. This article goes over what to do for each kind.

Please use recentchanges

river — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 02:05:16 +0000

The page MediaWiki:Sidebar is powered by other interface messages, use them!

What's up with Variables and Parsoid?

river — Fri, 03 May 2024 22:16:47 +0000

What you need to know about Parsoid development as it affects Extension:Variables

Style your code blocks with Pygments

river — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 03:02:39 +0000

Customizing your view-page syntax highlighting in MediaWiki

Markdown vs Wikitext

river — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 10:14:17 +0000

An at-a-glance guide to formatting Wikitext vs Markdown

Send me your wiki-updating scripts!

river — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 05:11:56 +0000

Contribute to my list of resources for editing MediaWiki with code

Dealing with defaults

river — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 11:20:30 +0000

There are a lot of different things you can mean when you say “default parameter” in MediaWiki. This article explains them all.

If {{NAMESPACE}} do nothing, otherwise...

river — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:34:28 +0000

A common design pattern in MediaWiki templating is to write {{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}||}}

I don't like infoboxes - EMWCon 2023

river — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:02:30 +0000

I attended EMWCon 2023 remotely again in 2023 and finally gave the presentation everyone has been waiting for: I don’t like infoboxes.

Toggleable columns

river — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 22:07:12 +0000

A simple interface to automatically let users toggle columns in any data table on the entire wiki.

How to find a namespace number

river — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 15:28:29 +0000

Here’s how you can find the number of a particular namespace

Make lots of sandbox pages

river — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 23:41:34 +0000

Instead of putting all of your code experiments on a single page, make lots of little sandbox pages!

MediaWiki hotkeys (the useful ones)

river — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 07:15:21 +0000

A list of just the useful hotkeys/access keys in MediaWiki

Comment your closing braces

river — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:22:52 +0000

This one trick will save you 80% of your wikitext debugging time!

Multi-Instance Subtemplates in Lua

river — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 04:44:14 +0000

We can serialize arguments from multi-instance subtemplates when working with Lua and retrieve our data in easy-to-work-with arrays using simple wrapper functions.

Top Schedule

river — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 13:25:44 +0000

How I created a global site banner on Leaguepedia using the extension Header Footer and some JavaScript, but no api calls

Bot passwords & you (& your bot (& you))

river — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 09:43:18 +0000

What’s a bot password? What’s the difference between bot accounts and bot passwords? Why do I need all this anyway?

Use cases for Highlight Links in Category

river — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 23:21:53 +0000

Highlight Links In Category is a very small MediaWiki extension that applies classes to links based on the links’ targets’ categories. It has a number of incredibly nice use cases; here I give some examples.

Adventures in caching primary keys

river — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 20:39:18 +0000

The pattern of store -> query -> store -> query can lead to caching nightmares when working with Cargo or SMW in MediaWiki. This is the story of how I dealt with one.

Popups

river — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 20:21:07 +0000

Popup content can offer users a wide range of dynamic content options on a page - and lazily-loading popup content can do this without increasing loading times. Here’s how I’ve built a framework for both static and lazily-loaded popups.

Highlighting disambiguations

river — Tue, 19 May 2020 13:21:48 +0000

Disambiguations are typically somewhat user-unfriendly, especially when a wiki has a relatively low percentage of pages that are disambiguated and so the presence of one is unexpected. Here I describe my method for improving quality of life when disambiguation links do appear.

CharInsert: Why you should "char"

river — Tue, 05 May 2020 04:46:37 +0000

CharInsert is one of my favorite extensions. Here’s how I made a Lua wrapper for it to create a user-friendly interface for anyone to add snippets they want.

Sublimetext for Mediawiki

river — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 07:03:23 +0000

The “Mediawiker” plugin makes Sublime the best IDE-like experience for editing wikis, particularly when one is primarily writing Scribunto/Lua modules. Here’s how I’ve set up my environment.

My EMWCon 2020 Talks

river — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 21:43:52 +0000

At EMWCon 2020, I gave one talk and hosted two Create Camp sessions, discussing different aspects of usage of Cargo and Lua in MediaWiki.

Gadgets for code organization

river — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 01:20:40 +0000

Though it’s mostly used as a way to let wikis have opt-in or opt-out CSS and JS features for users, the Gadgets extension is a great way to organize code instead of using Common.css and Common.js for everything.

Lua Hooks System

river — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 10:44:27 +0000

A system of hooks in Scribunto can be reasonable to use if you have a wikifarm with synced code that occasionally needs to be slightly modified on one or more wikis. I found the system more complicated than it was worth, but I’m documenting it here before I remove it.

Using the Mediawiki API without coding

river — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 04:22:03 +0000

Using the MediaWiki API doesn’t require coding. The on-wiki GUI provided at Special:ApiSandbox allows you to familiarize yourself with available actions, test queries, and run simple batch jobs without writing a single line of code!

Determining team members from roster change data: A Leaguepedia case study

river — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 23:55:49 +0000

Managing complexity using Cargo with MediaWiki to track League of Legends esports roster changes.

How to add Cargo docstrings on table pages

river — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 04:16:35 +0000

This is not a post about how to add Cargo docstrings on table pages. Rather, it’s a post about how to create workarounds in MediaWiki in a reasonably well-controlled manner.

New Roster Changes

river — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 18:03:16 +0000

An overview of the process I used to create our single-source-of-truth roster change database tables on Leaguepedia. This post originally was created as a user page on Leaguepedia.