Help:MediaWiki namespace page

The MediaWiki namespace is a namespace containing the text to be displayed in certain places in the interface. Only administrators and interface editors can edit pages in this namespace, but all editors can propose changes on appropriate talk pages.

Overview
The MediaWiki namespace allows administrators and interface editors to customise or translate the MediaWiki web interface.

Because the changes to these pages have a global effect, they are protected from editing, and only administrators and interface editors have the ability to edit them. Non-admins who would like to request a minor change can do so by using the template on the talk page of the MediaWiki page. More substantive changes should be discussed at an appropriate section of the Village pump; an edit request should then be made if there is consensus for the change.

Changes that can benefit other wiki sites and are not specific to Wikipedia can be submitted to translatewiki.net (also known as TWN, formerly known as BetaWiki). See translatewiki:Translate:MediaWiki. Since English is the original language of the messages, changes to them cannot be directly edited in translatewiki.net, and have to be discussed in the support page there.

MediaWiki pages can not and should not have documentation on the page itself for several reasons: among other things &lt;noinclude> tags usually do not function in this namespace and the amount of data in MediaWiki space needs to be kept low for performance reasons. Instead a description of the message can be put at the top of the talk page. A template interface explanation is available for this. Pages using this template can be found in Category:MediaWiki messages with interface explanation.

Some messages have old documentation available by setting the 'language' to qqq. For instance MediaWiki:Login has old, and somewhat incorrect, documentation at MediaWiki:Login/qqq. Don't update the /qqq messages, instead update the top of the talk page.

The message names for a particular interface element can be found using the "Add a toolbox link to reload the current page with the system message names exposed" Advanced Gadget in the Special:Preferences. Once enabled a "message names" item appears in the tool box, when clicked the names of all items are displayed.

Overview of messages
The template MediaWiki messages (shown below) lists a selection of key messages. Not included are


 * Abusefilter warnings, as there many of these, and they can be found here.
 * Tags added automatically to edit summaries by edit filters, which are listed at Special:Tags.
 * Messages describing Preferences options ( Mediawiki:Tog- ) – [ search for these].
 * Messages providing tooltips ( Mediawiki:Tooltip- ) – [ search for these].
 * Messages relating to Cite.php are listed and discussed at Help talk:Cite errors.
 * MediaWiki:Uploadtext and related subpages (the subpages transclude pages from Wikipedia: space) – these are covered at Wikipedia talk:Upload.
 * CSS files, which are described at MediaWiki talk:Common.css.
 * Gadget-related messages – Gadgets.

The template interface explanation, used on MediaWiki talk: pages (generally those with some discussion), adds pages it is on into Category:MediaWiki messages with interface explanation.

A complete list of messages is available at Special:Allmessages. MediaWiki messages serving the software default are called "unmodified" and appear as red links in the Allmessages list, and do not appear in a [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:PrefixIndex&prefix=&namespace=8 Prefix-based search] as they don't technically exist as pages. Because Special:Allmessages displays all system messages (the page is over 1 MB) some users might prefer to view these messages alphabetically: [ @] A B C D E F G H  I   J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

For a list of all MediaWiki pages, see Special:Prefixindex/MediaWiki:, or [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=1&ns8=1 search the MediaWiki namespace].

Technical details
The MediaWiki namespace is a mechanism allowing administrators to 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     messages is 8, with a corresponding      namespace 9 to discuss individual messages. Some projects offer templates like editprotected to propose modifications, others have a page like Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat for this purpose.


 * Links to MediaWiki messages work like links to ordinary pages, examples:
 * MediaWiki:Edit MediaWiki:Edit,
 * w:de:MediaWiki:Edit w:de:MediaWiki:Edit,
 * [ demo] [ demo].

Each message in the  array in Messages.php corresponds to a page in the MediaWiki namespace. For example, there may be a line in the php file:

'recentchanges' =&gt; 'Recent changes',

To this corresponds the page MediaWiki:Recentchanges, and. When this page is edited the new message is automatically used for the recent changes link in the left pane of the desktop site. Similarly w:fr:MediaWiki:Recentchanges has the content Modifications récentes, note that the page name itself is not translated.

Transclusion
Transclusion of MediaWiki messages can make sense, as noted below historically these messages also covered the function of templates.
 * , see.
 * , colon function int: is a shorthand for MediaWiki:.
 * , but only as far as the message exists.
 * doesn't exist.

The difference between and  is that  transcludes using the default language of the Wiki (i.e. English), whereas  transcludes using the language set by the user's preferences. For example, if your user language is not set to English, the following two lines will differ:

However many messages are not suited for transclusion, because they contain $1 and similar parameters not evaluated by the template parser, or raw CSS and XHTML markup not permitted on normal pages.

Interlanguage links
Interlanguage links in MediaWiki messages typically won't work as expected. Adding &lt;noinclude&gt; isn't good enough, because something has to evaluate it, as it's the case for messages included like ordinary templates, but not for messages used internally as system messages.

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

Strings exclusive to language file
Some text strings cannot be customised using this feature, and so can only be changed by editing the language file. These include:


 * The namespace titles "User", "Wikipedia", "Image", etc.
 * The names of the special pages
 * Month and days-of-the-week names
 * A number of items in Special:Preferences

History
The MediaWiki namespace was introduced on December 6, 2003. Before this time, user interface text was part of the PHP software and could only be changed by software developers. Since the introduction they have been editable by normal administrators.

Until June 2004, the MediaWiki namespace was also used for creating other boilerplate text messages, to be used in articles. This function was replaced with the Template namespace; a conversion script running as "User:Template namespace initialisation script", was run by developer Tim Starling, which moved all non-system messages to the new namespace, and replaced MediaWiki: references in articles with Template: in order to bypass the redirects. In October and November 2005, these redirects were deleted. This background explains why the concept now known as "templates" is sometimes referred to as "messages".

For a short time, before the renaming from votes for deletion (VfD) to articles for deletion (AfD), deletion debates used MediaWiki: messages named in the format "MediaWiki:VfD-articlename". These were moved to the Template: space in June 2004 and are now (as of January 2006) subpages of Articles for deletion or Votes for deletion.