FAQ

Why are you called Miraheze?
Why not?

How do I request a wiki?
Go to Special:RequestWiki, and fill in the form.

Why don't I have administrator or bureaucrat rights on my wiki?
Oops! This should be done automatically. If you leave a message on the Stewards' noticeboard, we'll take care of it ASAP!

How can I request a feature or extension on my wiki?
Please go to feature requests. It will be done as soon as possible.

How do I work with MediaWiki (e.g. creating and editing pages)?
Please check out the MediaWiki help center for more information about working with MediaWiki!

I am not able to access my wiki!
Are you sure your wiki has been created (according to Special:Log/farmer)? If yes, then MediaWiki might have logged more information about the error. Please contact a system administrator, so we can look at it.

How do I change my logo or favicon?
Please make a request at feature requests.

How can I get a custom domain for my wiki?
Please check custom domains and then request at feature requests.

How do you finance your hosting?
Miraheze entirely depends on donations from others. We do not have ads, neither do we get financed by a company or the government, so we can't exist without our donators. Please see donate and finance for more information.

How can I donate to Miraheze?
Miraheze currently accepts all payment methods accepted by PayPal. You may click here or send a donation directly to donate@miraheze.org. For more information, please see donate or contact Labster.

Why don't you have ads?
People dislike ads, ads won't gain us more money than donations (and it could be a reason for people to stop donating to us), it is a privacy leak, and we want to protect our wikis against companies that require us to adjust the content on our wikis (because otherwise they are going to remove their ads).

How do I install infoboxes on my wiki, like Wikipedia has?
First, you will need to copy the CSS from Wikipedia's Mediawiki:Common.css file into the  on your own wiki. You don't have to copy the whole file, just the sections that start with. Then you will have to install the specific infobox templates that you want. You can get the templates with wikipedia:Special:Export and then install them into your wiki with your  page. Be sure to click the "Include templates" button before export! Finally, hard refresh your browser page to make sure that the Common.css changes have loaded (the earlier change can take up to 10 minutes to take effect).

How do I get a backup of my wiki?
All Miraheze wikis are backed up using Tech:Bacula, but you can request backups of your wiki only on Phabricator and they will be done and sent to you by a sysadmin. For more details please see Backups.

How do I import a wiki?
To import a wiki you need to upload an XML dump of the wiki on Phabricator or send it to staff@undefinedmiraheze.org. For more details please see Imports.

How do I make a notice appear on every page?
Add the notice you want to see on the  page of your wiki. If it doesn't display, you might need to change the number on the  page -- you can just keep increasing numbers 1, 2, 3, and so on. This is caused by the DismissableSiteNotice extension, which lets people close the SiteNotice once they've read it.

How do I make my wiki read-only?
For making your wiki read only from everyone (including yourself) for specific periods of time you can request the "ProtectSite" extension.

For making it read-only to specific users/groups only you can request editing restrictions.

How can I make my wiki a custom domain?
For anything related to Custom domains please see the Custom domain page.

How do I change the site name / language of my wiki?
You can go to Special:ManageWiki on your wiki and change these settings.

Why am I on another wikis' Special:Listusers?
You are there because every time you view a Miraheze wiki while being logged in to any other Miraheze wiki, your global account is automatically attached to the local wiki, and therefore to the user list.

How can I allow a user to read the content on my wiki?
Please go to Special:UserRights on your wiki, enter the username of the user that should have read access and add them to the member group.

How can I make my wiki private/public?
You can go to Special:ManageWiki and check or uncheck the "private" box.

How can I remove the bureaucrat rights of a user?
Only stewards can remove the bureaucrat rights of a user. Please ask a steward to remove the rights if you have a valid reason (e.g. clear abuse). If you need to be able to remove bureaucrats more often please request a change at Request features, describing what groups you'd like to be able to remove bureaucrats. If you have it changed so that bureaucrats (the highest default group) can remove other bureaucrats, other bureaucrats can remove you.

How can I grant Oversight or CheckUser rights to a user?
Because these rights allow access to extremely sensitive private information, access is restricted to stewards and other highly-trusted users. Please read CheckUser and Oversight for more information about requesting a CheckUser or suppression. If you think that you (or someone else) has a valid need for CheckUser/Oversight rights, please ask the stewards for more information at Stewards' noticeboard.

Closed wikis
Effective 5 January 2016, the Dormancy Policy applies to all wikis.

To prevent any difference between FAQ answers and what the policy states, we encourage you to read our Dormancy Policy.

How do close my wiki on Miraheze?
To close your wiki you can go to Special:ManageWiki and tick the closed button.

Ho do I reopen my wiki?
You can reopen your wiki by visiting Special:ManageWiki and unchecking the "closed" box.

How do I move my wiki?
On request, Miraheze can provide you with a content dump of your wiki in XML format. If the wiki is small enough, you can probably just paste the contents of  into   and do it yourself. These export files can be given to another wiki host directly for Mediawiki, or you can potentially be converted into another wiki's format. If it's small enough, again, you can probably just upload the file yourself on your new wiki's  page.

To request a content dump, open an issue on our Phabricator.

Where can I find your configuration?
We have a [//github.com/miraheze GitHub organization] where we store our Puppet configuration, extensions, MediaWiki install and other code.

I want to get involved in your work!
Sure, we love that! Please check out contributing for more information.

Why can't I access the site using HTTP?
As you might know, Wikipedia (and sister projects) are HTTPS-only too. This inspired us to make our sites HTTPS-only too (wikis with custom domains must have a valid SSL certificate too), because we want to keep private information secure, and to protect users against downgrade attacks. We are not offering ways to access the wikis using HTTP, and we do not officially support any ways to do so (such as HTTP-to-HTTPS proxies).

Has your question not been answered in this FAQ? Feel free to ask at Community noticeboard.