The select few - two I think - are employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, and they are developers of MediaWiki, as it is free as in libre (open source) software written for the Foundation's projects. It just happened these are very nice people who decided to release the software and package it up for others to use. The capital letters in the section of the GPL shown at Special:Version are part of the GPL, that is the verbatim text. MediaWiki developers didn't write it.
On 11/04/07, Ian Smith ismith@good.com wrote:
Monahon, Peter B.:
Peter Blaise responds: Thanks, Gary, I'm not sure what you mean, though. "... include the Wikipedia: namespace in the search..." by doing what?
If you're going to set up a MediaWiki site, then the first thing you have to do is get familiar with using MediaWiki. Otherwise you're just going to waste a lot of time (yours and others'). One way you can do this is to get used to using Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, if you click the button marked "Search", it will take you to a page that explains all about searching -- including how to search specific namespaces.
I searched inside MediaWiki/WikiMedia/Wikipedia and found nothing inside them.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Looking in there for detailed support information for a specific software package won't do you much good.
Wikimedia is a foundation which supports the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content. They aren't specifically concerned with supporting software.
The one place for MediaWiki info is (theoretically) http://www.mediawiki.org/; for historical reasons, there is still a lot of MediaWiki info on http://meta.wikimedia.org/, which is in the process of being moved to mediawiki.org.
And yes, all of this is documented: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Names
Who are the select few here who are not volunteers, who have to help me, presumably for pay?
I think the point that people are trying to make is that *no-one* here *has* to help you, for pay or otherwise. MediaWiki is not a commercial software package, with commercial support; it's software that's offered to the public as a gift. You didn't pay for it, and you don't have to use it if you don't want to. If you want people to just sacrifice their time to help you, then at least be nice. But if you want paid support, and you have the money to pay someone's salary, maybe someone would be willing to help. (I'm too busy, even if you could afford me... ;-)
How do you create an admin or sysops after the Wiki's built?
Have the person create a user ID, then edit the user's privileges in Special:Userrights.
Ian
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l