About Wiki Practice Guide

Where the facts come from

• The help and project pages of the English Wikipedia (for sandboxes, template test cases and Lua), read in October 2026.
• Test Wikipedia's main page, its administrator policy and its list of other test wikis, Wikipedia:Requests/Tools.
• MediaWiki.org's manuals (installation, Scribunto, the version lifecycle), MediaWiki's own release notes and release tags, and Wikitech's pages on the deployment train and the Beta Cluster.
• The Debian and Ubuntu package archives, for the PHP version each release ships.
• The public test wikis themselves, where their pages can be read, for rules, versions and statistics.
• For The Test Wiki at wiki.xyrael.net: copies of its 2006–08 pages kept by the Internet Archive (main page, policies, version and statistics pages), and the main page of thetestwiki.org.

Wikis change their rules often, so every page shows when it was last checked and figures such as version numbers are dated. Where a source is unclear we leave the detail out. Corrections are welcome and are made as soon as a better source is found.

Independence and advertising

Wiki Practice Guide is not a wiki and cannot grant rights on any wiki. It has no connection with the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, MediaWiki.org, Miraheze, Fandom or any test wiki it describes, and their names are used only to identify them. The site is paid for by display advertising, which is always labelled.

The history of this domain

From 2005 xyrael.net was a personal website, and from 2006 to 2008 its subdomain wiki.xyrael.net hosted The Test Wiki, a community wiki for trying MediaWiki's administrator tools. Later owners used the domain for unrelated sites, and after it lapsed it served spam pages. Wiki Practice Guide is a new project with no connection to any earlier owner or to The Test Wiki; links that once pointed to the old wiki now lead to a page explaining what it was.