MediaWiki Editing Tips
From Perl QA
Some tips specific to MediaWiki for those who have used other types of Wikis before.
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[edit] Naming
- You don't have to mangle phrases to fit CamelCase, and we'd prefer you didn't. Spaces are just fine. Thus its perfectly ok to link to Michael G Schwern rather than MichaelGSchwern. In fact, just about anything is fine.
- Colons are ok, too. Thus if you want to make a page about Test::Harness you don't have to mangle the name!
[edit] Editing
- MediaWiki does not automatically change CamelCase into a wiki link. You have to do it explicitly with double square brackets. See MediaWiki Help:Link for details.
- Use redirects to point multiple wiki words at the same page. For example, MichaelGSchwern is a redirect to Schwern.
- Pages can be explicitly renamed/moved, rather than cut & pasted, to preserve history. A redirect from the old name to the new will remain so old links still work.
- Rather than cluttering up the page itself with comments, suggestions and questions you can discuss the page in its talk page, the "discussion" link above. For example, Talk:MediaWiki_Editing_Tips. Please sign your messages.
[edit] Features
- Categories are a very powerful feature of MediaWiki. For example, you can put all the pages pasted from the Old Wiki into its own category: Category:Old Wiki . That way they can be found and cleaned up.
- There are a large number of Special pages which do special things such as finding Orphaned Pages (pages which no one links to) and pages that need writing. Poke through the list of special pages to see what they can do.
- Many wiki commands have hotkeys. Just hover your mouse over an item (such as the edit button) and read the tooltip.
[edit] Usernames
- When you create a user account on the system it gives you a page like User:Skud which is your "user page". You should refer to users by this link, though to make it pretty you can do [[User:Skud|Skud]] in the markup. User pages allow you to see a user's contributions, etc.
- You can leave messages for another user through their talk page such as User_talk:Schwern.
- You can sign your contributions (especially comments in a Talk page) by using the markup --~~~~. That's two dashes and four tildes. Note that there's a little signature icon above the editing textbox. Second from the right, looks like a signature. This will auto-date and link to your user page.
