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Just did a quick check and I'm pleasantly surprised to see that at least half of the NIWA wikis are using the most recent version of MediaWiki (1.21.2).  The other half range from being a minor version behind to several version behind (WarsWiki is 1.16.0). 

Upgrading is something I have come to dread, especially when there are database schema updates.  Everything is fine if there are no errors, but there always seem to be some errors and fixing them always seems painful to me.  Another annoyance is that due to being on cheaper webhosting, the Dragon Quest Wiki host kills any process that runs on the shared server for a lengthy amount of time.  This can kill the upgrade process, or at least make it fairly difficult.

I would love to see info like this posted on this forum.  There have been hardly any posts in here.  Sharing details of how an upgrade went, what went wrong, etc. would be really useful to compare with others.  Also, sharing information on new extensions you install and why, extensions you've removed and why, etc would be really useful.  Across NIWA, we are using a whole lot of variety when it comes to how each wiki is installed and configured.  I know I could benefit a lot from seeing what others are doing.

No Dragon Quest news came out of E3 from either Square Enix or Nintendo.  Underscored by the poor sales of Dragon Quest X on the Wii U, Dragon Quest has officially been abandoned again in North America.  Square Enix simply cannot get their act together and made a horrible decision in making Dragon Quest X an online-only, subscription based game. 

Dragon Quest was dead in North America from 1992-1999.  Looks like we are entering the second "dark age" for the game series which is arguably the best selling series of all time in Japan.

Using Google Reader, here are some NIWA stats.  Note that these are taken from the recent changes feeds of each wiki and are bound to have differences, config settings, etc that skew the data.

Site	Changes per week	Percentage of total
Bulbapedia	4117.4	36.43%
Mario	3354.4	29.68%
Zelda	1677.7	14.84%
Smash Wiki	833.5	7.37%
Strategy	500.7	4.43%
WikiBound	178.3	1.58%
Metroid	145.8	1.29%
Nookipedia	96.9	0.86%
WiKirby	78.2	0.69%
Golden Sun	62.8	0.56%
Pikmin Fanon	56.9	0.50%
Fire Emblem	46.9	0.41%
Nintendo	46.2	0.41%
Pikipedia	31	0.27%
Donkey Kong	28.9	0.26%
Starfy	24.7	0.22%
Lylat	13.5	0.12%
Wars Wiki	9.8	0.09%
NIWA Total	11303.6	100.00%

While I'm still waiting for any kind of response in the membership forum....

jQuery is included with Mediawiki 1.16 and newer.  In 1.17, you can load portions of the jQuery UI library on demand in your Common.js file as part of the ResourceLoader portions of Mediawiki. 

There are a lot of uses for jQuery within the wiki pages.  For example, a couple of the NIWA wikis use the Tabber extension (or at least include it).  However, jQuery has its own tabs you can use instead to save on performance. 

I've been experimenting with using the jQuery tabs and ways to include video content on wiki articles without it becoming too cluttered.

http://dragon-quest.org/wiki/Tantegel
http://dragon-quest.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.js

Recently we have had some problems with wiki spammers.  So far, I haven't been able to stop them altogether. 

The spammers create an account, then upload an image and create a page with spam that contains the image.  It's usually nothing vulgar, just random junk.  I tightened up the permissions and made more privileges required a confirmed email address.  However, I found that the spammers were using legit 'throw away' email addresses and confirming the accounts. 

They are most likely bots, but they most be somewhat complex to be giving an email address and then confirming it.  The IP addresses come from all over.  I've moved more privs into 'autoconfirmed' but I'm not sure how to stop them.   Any other wikis had problems?

Anyone know anything about configuring mediawiki feeds (RSS/Atom)? 

I think it would be useful to put more information in the recent changes feed.  Then you wouldn't have to go to the diff page to see what was changed.  However, it looks like I will have to dig into the mediawiki source since the only configuration is for feed types, etc.

I'd like some opinions on whether it is a good idea or a bad idea to use lots of templates to hold content.  I've found that there is a lot of content on the wiki which is duplicated in many places.  Rather than try to maintain all of them, it makes sense to dump it into a template, right?  Well, that results in a LOT of templates and subtemplates.  I'm wondering if following this strategy will end in performance issues with all the transcluding. 

For example, here is a template I recently redesigned:  http://dragon-quest.org/wiki/Template:DQIXQuest/3.  Each quest has a separate subtemplate identified by its number (1-184).  And here is an example of bad design: http://dragon-quest.org/w/index.php?title=Template:9E&action=edit.  This template holds all of the content which then gets transcluded each time it is called.  I know it needs fixed, but is creating 200+ subtemplates really the best design? 

Where is the line between using templates for repetitive content versus not having too many?

Here's something I don't understand.  I have done some searching but have to yet to find a good answer.

If I google "Pikachu site:bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net" I get lots of articles.  If I switch to image search, I get lots of images.
If I google "Hero site:dragon-quest.org" I get lots of articles.  If I switch to image search, I get nothing.  What gives?

Does this have anything to do with the robots.txt for a site?  I'm not sure because the 2 sites really are similar.

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/robots.txt
http://dragon-quest.org/robots.txt

What web hosts do NIWA wikis use? 

Over on Dragon Quest Wiki, we are now using hostgator.  I chose it because of the ability to have access to a shell login (although it is a jailed shell).  I did have problems installing MediaWiki, however.  They have a quota on the amount of time any one site can use the CPU on shared servers.  The installer seemed to have problems finishing the install because of this.  I managed to get things sorted out manually, but I don't envy having to do it somewhere else.  I would expect that these sort of quotas are typical of shared server setups.

Do most NIWA sites do an install using the web installer?  Or using the command line version?