Useful Gadgets

The Gadgets extension allows for extra user features to be enabled and disabled as the user desires. Some of these features provide different skin layouts, extra editing features, and various other things that can make a beginner to MediaWiki's life easier.

Gadgets can be installed by copying the appropriate files needed to make them work from another wiki to your own, then they can be selected from the preferences menu.

Below will be a list of sites with gadgets most useful to beginning users and where to get them. These gadget may also be exported from this wiki and reused by anyone else.

'''Note: Not all gadgets will work out of the box, and those listed may not work on all types of wiki setups. There are also included notes on how to make certain gadgets work better or how to avoid some problems getting them to work.'''

If anyone else knows of gadgets that are useful to MediaWiki beginners, please feel free to list them here

Gadgets from Wikipedia

 * wikED is an extension that provides a gadget version of the features of the WikiEditor extension (and some features WikiEditor doesn't have). It a good extension to use if you:
 * Have a wiki that doesn't have WikiEditor installed or it is not available as an option.
 * You don't like the features of WikiEditor for one reason or another
 * You prefer the layout and features of wikED over WikiEditor or the default editor interface.
 * Navigation Popups is an extension that shows a brief preview of the content behind links (except links to other websites) and provides a popup list of detailed editing options as well. It will also show references and citations if you hover over a link to one. Works quite well with the Cite Extension.

Gadgets From Wikia

 * AjaxRC: Add checkbox to Special:RecentChanges/Special:Watchlist which toggles automatic refreshing of the page once a minute.
 * This gadget is quite useful if you have a tab open to recent changes and don't want to have to refresh it several times in a row. If you have a need to monitor recent changes for one reason or another (on high traffic wikis, this is very useful for administrators), this is a highly recommended gadget.
 * If it has one downside, it's that this gadget only works on MediaWiki 1.20 and above.