Anyone have experience with mediawiki?

[edmicman]

I've got a somewhat collaborative project I want to do that I was going to build myself in PHP, mySQL, etc.. But I was poking around the mediawiki project (which wikipedia is based on) and I think I can use that instead for what I want to do. It saves me building something from scratch, and I think it offers some other nice features that I wouldn't have thought of. What I can't seem to find though, is there any sort of "central" administration to the wiki? Theres a sysop user, but I'm not seeing where theres much in the way of "global" configuration options, like setting a site skin, managing users, creating pages? Any ideas? Does anyone else play with this? Thanks!