Working with MediaWiki was originally published in November 2012. A “2nd printing” of the 1st edition was released in April 2014; it had substantial changes and fixes to the content. The 2nd edition was then released in March 2017. It was even more of an overhaul; most notably, it removed most of the content about Semantic MediaWiki, replacing it with a chapter about Cargo. The 2nd printing of the 2nd edition was released in June 2020; it updated a significant portion of the book, especially the JavaScript-related parts. The 3rd printing of the 2nd edition was released in November 2022; it included a variety of new functionality such as (no surprise) the Vector 2022 skin, as well as extensions that were added to the book in part to harmonize its contents with those of the then-recently-released Canasta MediaWiki distribution.

So what has changed between then and now? In the larger tech world, there is no question that the biggest change has been the meteoric rise of generative AI: a technology that has already touched, or at least threatens to touch, nearly aspect of the world, including the fields of writing and software development. (I should note, since perhaps nowadays it needs to be said, that no part of this book was generated by AI.)

The chapter on developing MediaWiki extensions was removed, as was the afterword about structured wikis. In their place is a new chapter, “AI and the future of wikis”, which in a sense replaces both. Standard MediaWiki development has certainly been affected by AI – there are whole extensions that were entirely AI-generated, and many developers (myself included, to a limited extent) use AI, especially to get started on a project, reducing the need for any sort of MediaWiki development guide. And the concept of structured wikis fits in in a variety of interesting ways to LLM chatbots: it could be that, in the future, structured data (on wikis and elsewhere) will serve mostly as raw material for generative AI – a development that does not necessarily make structure data any less important.

As for the rest of the book, there have been the usual additions and removals of extensions: for example, DiscussionTools has (thankfully) almost completely replaced StructuredDiscussions. Important new extensions like InlineComments and Springboard have been developed. And images have been updated to reflect changes to user interfaces, including the now-widespread usage of the Vector 2022 skin.

Yaron Koren

May 2026