Mediawiki extensions question

[John W Foster <johnwfoster@verizon.net>]

I have added a lot of extensions to the Debian installed wiki that I
have running. 2 things are concerning me: 1. the extensions do not show
up in [[Special:Versions]] as they should including those installed by
Debian. 2. I can not tell if any of them are working at all. 
I installed them by puting the extensions
in /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions & then softlinking them
to /etc/mediawiki-extensions/available  &
to /etc/mediawiki-extensionsenabled
This is not generating any error messages within the pages of my wiki,
also I can see no indication that they are working either.
Any tips would be appreciated.
Thanks!
frosty