I am looking to install mediawiki on a production server (after doing a test on a development one). I could not really understand why the default location for the mediawiki files is /var/lib/mediawiki. I would have thought /var/www would've made more sense. I did some research and in http://people.canonical.com/~cjwatson/ubuntu-policy/policy.html/ch-customized-programs.html#s-web-appl it says the following Web Document Root Web Applications should try to avoid storing files in the Web Document Root. Instead they should use the /usr/share/doc/package directory for documents and register the Web Application via the doc-base package. If access to the web document root is unavoidable then use /var/www Can anyone explain why this is please?