Help:MediaWiki namespace: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:57, 4 April 2025

Revision as of 11:59, 4 April 2025

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==Technical details==

The MediaWiki namespace is a mechanism allowing administrators to [[m:Help:System message|customise or translate the MediaWiki web interface]]. It is enabled by default in recent mediawiki versions, [[mw:Manual:$wgUseDatabaseMessages]] = true enables them. The contents of the MediaWiki namespace pages override any corresponding settings in the language files, i.e., the static version of messages. Using the MediaWiki namespace is a bit slower than other namespaces.

The namespace number of {{ns:8}} messages is '''8''', with a corresponding {{ns:9}} namespace '''9''' to discuss individual messages.

Some projects offer templates like {{tiw|en|editprotected}} to propose modifications, others have a page like

[[m:Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat|Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat]] for this purpose.

;Links to MediaWiki messages work like links to ordinary pages, examples:

:<kbd><nowiki>[[MediaWiki:Edit]]</nowiki></kbd> [[MediaWiki:Edit]],

:<kbd><nowiki>[[w:de:MediaWiki:Edit]]</nowiki></kbd> [[w:de:MediaWiki:Edit]],

:<kbd><nowiki>[{{fullurl:m:MediaWiki:Edit|action=render}} demo]</nowiki></kbd> [{{fullurl:m:MediaWiki:Edit|action=render}} demo].

Each message in the [[gerrit:g/mediawiki/core/+/refs/heads/master/languages/i18n/en.json|<code>i18n/en.json</code>]] file corresponds to a page in the MediaWiki namespace. For example, there is a line in the JSON file:

<syntaxhighlight lang="json">

"recentchanges": "Recent changes",

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However many messages are not suited for transclusion, because they contain '''$1''' and similar parameters not evaluated by the

template parser, or raw [[w:Cascading Style Sheets|CSS]] and [[w:en:XHTML|XHTML]] markup not permitted on normal pages.

==== With parameters ====

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===Interlanguage links===

[[Help:Interwiki linking|Interlanguage link]]slinks in MediaWiki messages typically won't work as expected. Adding <kbd>&lt;noinclude&gt;</kbd> isn't good enough, because something has to evaluate it, as it's the case for messages [[#Inclusion|included]] like ordinary templates, but not {{clarifyme}} for messages used internally as system messages.

Instead, one can use in-page interlanguage links on the talk pages, {{tim|ilm}} does this for some major projects.

== History ==