Where to practise MediaWiki: sandboxes and test wikis

Pick a place to practise

• Your sandboxA page of your own on Wikipedia for first edits and drafts.
• Templates and LuaSandbox and test-case pages for changing templates and modules safely.
• Test WikipediaWhere MediaWiki's newest code is tried out, and who may be an admin there.
• Admin practice wikisPublic test wikis that hand out sysop rights so you can try the tools.
• A wiki of your ownWhat you need to install MediaWiki and hold every right yourself.
• The Test Wiki, 2006–08What wiki.xyrael.net was, how it worked and how big it grew.

Which test wiki fits what you want to try

The right place depends on how much you want to change. Ordinary editing can be practised on any wiki, including Wikipedia itself, in pages set aside for experiments. Anything that needs extra rights — deleting pages, protecting them, blocking accounts, editing the interface — needs a wiki that will give you those rights, and the only one guaranteed to do so is a wiki you install yourself.

Start in a sandbox

A sandbox is the simplest test page: an ordinary wiki page whose name tells everyone it is for experiments. On the English Wikipedia, sandboxes have fewer rules than articles — you do not have to follow the Manual of Style or reach consensus before a big change — but the rules on civility, personal attacks and copyright still apply.

• Your own sandbox. Every registered account has one at Special:MyPage/sandbox, reached from the Sandbox link at the top of the screen (in the user menu on the Vector 2022 skin). Opening it for the first time adds the {{User sandbox}} notice, which tells readers the page is not an article and asks search engines not to index it.
• More sandboxes. Any subpage of your user page can be one, for example User:Example/sandbox2; add {{User sandbox|a=yes}} as its first line.
• The shared sandbox. Wikipedia:Sandbox is open to every visitor. Temporary accounts cannot create pages in the User namespace, so they get no personal sandbox and experiment here instead.

The Sandbox link is not only an English feature: the help page Help:My sandbox lists 82 Wikipedia language editions that show it, from Arabic to Zulu. More in our guide to using your Wikipedia sandbox.

Practise templates and Lua without breaking pages

Template changes are tested on two subpages before they go live. For a template named Template:X, the new code goes on Template:X/sandbox and examples that call both versions go on Template:X/testcases, so differences show side by side. Most protected templates on the English Wikipedia already have both pages, linked from the foot of their documentation.

• Use the test-case pattern for any template with ParserFunctions whose output varies, especially ones with many parameters or a long #switch.
• For quick experiments, the temporary templates {{X1}} to {{X20}} exist; for a brand-new template, build it in your user space first.
• Before editing a live template, open What links here to see how many pages will change with it.

Lua is the other half of advanced templating. The Scribunto extension lets templates run Lua scripts called modules, stored in the Module namespace (Module:Example) and called with {{#invoke:Example|functionName}}. The English Wikipedia has allowed Lua since February 2013, and Scribunto runs Lua 5.1. A module can be practised the same way as a template, in a sandbox copy, or on your own wiki with Scribunto installed. Step by step: template sandboxes and test cases and Lua modules with Scribunto.

Test Wikipedia: a test wiki for the software

Test Wikipedia, at test.wikipedia.org, exists so developers can test code without breaking a real project. It normally runs the same version of MediaWiki as mediawiki.org and the other wikis in the first deployment group, sometimes with experimental features switched on, so its content is volatile. Sister sites test2.wikipedia.org and test.wikidata.org serve the same purpose.

Its main page is blunt about what it is not: not a place for meaningful content, not a web host and not an area to play with administrator's tools — for that it sends visitors to a list of other test wikis. Teachers may use it to show basic editing to a class, though its interface can differ from an ordinary Wikimedia wiki.

Further along the release pipeline sits the Beta Cluster, a production-like copy of Wikimedia's servers in Cloud VPS for final-stage testing. Since 2024 its maintainers have said it is largely unmaintained while they move common uses to on-demand test environments such as PatchDemo and Catalyst. More on Test Wikipedia and its sister wikis.

Test wikis where you can try the admin tools

Several independent wikis exist so that anyone can become an administrator and press the buttons a real wiki keeps locked. Test Wikipedia keeps a list of them; the table shows what it said in October 2026. Each wiki sets its own rules, so read its main page and policies before you ask for rights; our page on admin test wikis explains how each one grants them.

What you can practise there is what an administrator does every day: deleting and restoring pages, protecting them against editing or moving, blocking and unblocking accounts and IP ranges, and editing interface messages such as MediaWiki:Sidebar. Bureaucrats can also grant and remove rights on Special:UserRights. Every one of these actions lands in a public log, which is part of the lesson.

Run a wiki of your own

Installing MediaWiki yourself is the only way to practise everything: settings, extensions, skins, upgrades and every right in the software. Because you control the server, you can give your own account any right and undo any mistake by restoring a backup.

• What it needs. A web server, PHP and a database server. MediaWiki 1.46.2, the stable release in October 2026, needs PHP 8.3.0 or newer; the long-term support branch is 1.43 (1.43.11).
• On Debian or Ubuntu. The manual installs Apache, MariaDB and the PHP modules from the package manager in one command: apache2 mariadb-server php php-intl php-mbstring php-apcu php-curl php-mysql php-xml.
• On Windows or macOS. Bundles such as XAMPP or MAMP put a web server, PHP and a database in one download. Check the bundled PHP first: in May 2025 XAMPP shipped PHP 8.2, older than current MediaWiki requires.
• Without a server. A wiki farm hosts the wiki for you; mediawiki.org keeps a list of hosting services. You get administrator rights on your own wiki but not access to the server's settings.
• Step by step. Versions, requirements and a Debian or Ubuntu walk-through are in our guide to installing MediaWiki.

What wiki.xyrael.net was: The Test Wiki

From 2006 to 2008 the address wiki.xyrael.net carried The Test Wiki, a community MediaWiki site where anyone could become a sysop by asking a bureaucrat who knew them from another wiki or from IRC. Its basic rules were short: test the sysop and bureaucrat tools, have fun, and do not ruin others' fun. By September 2008 it had 732 registered users, 275 of them administrators.

A wiki of the same name, whose main page keeps those rules almost word for word, has run at thetestwiki.org since January 2010. Wiki Practice Guide is not that wiki and keeps none of the old wiki's pages. Its rules, software and numbers are in the history of The Test Wiki.