Wiki Mediawiki Understanding

MediaWiki

• ... Is a content management software for
  • Richly formatted hybertext documents
  • Structured data
• ... based on the "wiki way":
  • User-governed
  • Collaborative
  • Easy to use

Mediawiki definitions

Namespaces

• Prefixes, separated from title by colon ":"
• Not all prefixes that end with ":" are namespaces!
  • Available prefxes provided by MediaWiki, more can be added in configuration
    • Default:Main(empty)
    • User
    • Category
    • Template
    • Help
    • MediaWiki
    • File
    • Special
    • Project(sitename)
  • The purpose is to distinguish basic "content types"
• Namespaces can have aliases (ex. File: and Image:)
• Special: is for pages that has fixed functionality, Editing is NOT possible here.
• Every namespace has a talk version; Talk User talk,...

Subpages

• Postfixes, seperated from title bt slash "/"
• Not all postfixes after "/" are subpages!
  • Enable for certain namespaces
  • By default only for User and all Talk pages
• Often not appropriate for organising pages (rigid, hierarchical content structure)
• Small difference to pages with "/" in title
  • For exsample when moving pages

Category

• Preferred way to organise pages in MediaWiki
• "Links" to Category pages mean: "page is in category"
  • Example: [[Category:City]] on page of Copenhagen
• Categories can be described by pages
• Category "Links" on Category pages mean: "page is subcategory of"
  • Example: [[Category:Settlement]] on Category:City
• Category "hierarchy" can be any graph (multi-inheritage, cycles,...)
• Used for browsing, but not for search

Redirects

• A page can redirect to any other page
• It should contain one line only
  • Example #REDIRCT [[Target page name]]
• Very useful for creating synonyms and search hints

Templates

• Transclusion: Insert the content of one page into another
• Parameters can be given: Use given values to substitute place holders in transcluded page.
• Wikitext to transclude a page with parameters: [[Page to transclude|parameters1=value1|...]]
• Wikitext for place holders {{{parameter1}}}