Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 73: Build Your Personal Wikipedia

Level Advanced

Platform Windows

Cost Free

The collaboratively edited Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) is a vast, searchable repository of information, constantly written and rewritten by its readers. Do you ever wish you or your group could have your own editable encyclopedia of brain dumps and documentation like Wikipedia? You can! Clear your mind and build your collective offline memory using MediaWiki (http://mediawiki.org), the same software that powers Wikipedia. MediaWiki is freely available for anyone to install. In this hack, you set up MediaWiki on your Windows PC and add and edit pages to your new, local personalpedia.

What You Need

• A Windows computer, not already running Apache web server.
• WampServer software, the all-in-one PHP/MySQL/Apache installation for Windows, available as a free download at www.wampserver.com/en. See Hack 72, “Run Full-Fledged Webapps from Your Home Computer,” to learn how to set up WampServer.
• MediaWiki, available as a free download at http://mediawiki.org.

Set Up MediaWiki

Setting up MediaWiki involves configuring the WampServer web and database servers, which you did in the previous hack, and configuring the MediaWiki source files, which are covered here.

warning Running a server on your personal computer can be a security risk. Make sure you are behind a firewall that prevents unauthorized access to your server. See Hack 108, “Firewall Your Windows PC,” for more information.

1. Download MediaWiki ...