Communication

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Fundamental Introduction to MediaWiki

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There are several ways to get in contact with other MediaWiki users, or to get instant help. The recommended possibilities are listed below.

Chat

#mediawiki on irc.freenode.net is the around-the-clock IRC channel for realtime communication.

Please read the FAQ before asking.
State your problem immediately and wait for a response. Don't ask "is there anyone here" or "can someone help me". This is normal IRC etiquette and allows participants to multitask effectively.
Expect to wait for some time for an initial response, especially in off-peak times. Despite this, out of courtesy for the volunteer who is helping you, try to answer their questions promptly.

If you don't get an answer, this could mean one of a number of things:

Nobody was around at the time of day you chose. If the channel is generally quiet, come back later.
You're asking a question which nobody knows the answer to, or which requires a lot of work to answer.
You're asking a question which is in the FAQ or the manual, and the volunteers in the channel feel it would be best if you found it yourself.

Questions relating to problems with your particular installation of MediaWiki are generally best answered on IRC, since they often require a back-and-forth exchange to isolate the problem, which is tedious when performed on the mailing lists.

Mailing lists

Get in contact!

mediawiki-l (or via Gmane) (or via your newsreader) is the high-traffic mailing list to ask for support.
wikitech-l (or via Gmane) (or via your newsreader) is the high-traffic mailing list for software development, especially when it relates to Wikimedia (not just MediaWiki) wikis.
mediawiki-announce (or via Gmane) (or via your newsreader) is a low-traffic list for announcements of new MediaWiki releases and security updates (all messages also go to mediawiki-l).

Please check the archives first! To search the archives, you can restrict most search engines

by server name (site:mail.wikipedia.org, e.g. Google) or
by the directory containing a particular list's archive (site:mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/<list name>, e.g. Google).

Using "mail.wikipedia.org" seems to work better than "mail.wikimedia.org" for this purpose, though both are valid URLs.

All three lists are also available through Gmane which provides access as newsgroups or in various web-based formats, and includes its own archives and archive search.

Websites

Wikimedia's Meta-Wiki was formerly where documents were managed and proposals were discussed before this site was started. There is still a lot of content there that has yet to be moved.
MediaZilla is where feature requests and bugs may be reported or browsed.