Jamie, thank you for your answer. Of course I'm running mediawiki 1.5 (I wrote this in the subject of the mail), and - of course - I've read the help page. But this didn't help me, remember that wiki help pages change, and for example, now there is no advice for how to change subtitles. I understand that mediawiki has a very different logic - for example - from a CMS but, may I tell that I'm surprised to how counterintuitive is to make simple changes in navigation links or other elementary parameters like title, subtitle and header of page? I'm doing this work in order to validate (for the Education Italian Ministry) this Wiki as a pedagogical tool for Italian students, but if neither I (knowing English and technologically trained) can understand how to use it, how non-expert people could? For example, now I have re-installed everything, and I have a default LocalSettings.php but: 1) the title is: "WIKIPEDIA", and not: "LESWIKI" as I want 2) the subtitle is: "L'Enciclopedia libera", but what I want: "L'enciclopedia mia" 3) under the title of every single page there is: "Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera", that I want to change in: "Da Leswiki, l'enciclopedia mia" How many changes I've I to do to achieve what I want? Thank you again, N. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jamie Bliss" <astronouth7303(a)gmail.com> To: <mediawiki-l(a)Wikimedia.org> Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2005 8:12 PM Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Re: mediawiki 1.5: navigation is so difficult? INDIRE(OUTBOUND):messaggio controllato dal server antivirus INDIRE(OUTBOUND):messaggio controllato dal server antivirus

On 11/28/2005, "Rob Church" <robchur(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, but it is infrequent-by-many- i.e., I'd guess virtually everyone tries to do it once, and it is an early task that forms a key first impression of the quality of the software for admins. It really is something that should be fixed if mediawiki wants to become more than just the wiki that powers wikipedia. Luis

Rowan Collins wrote: I think, what most people installing MediaWiki find confusing, is the absence of any centralized administrative interface; some parameters are configured in a script (LocalSettings.php), others directly in the database (e.g. Interwiki links), and again others in the MediaWiki-namespace etc.; additionally, there are some configurations seen on the Wikimedia sites which are completely undocumented, e.g. based on extensions, or MonoBook.{js|css} hacking, or templating etc., and a lot is changing between the releases (e.g. location of the translations for interface elements). Even if one was involved for some time in a Wikimedia project, one won't know exactly how all of this is tied together. Beyond that, what makes running your own MediaWiki site a real challenge is the current state of the documentation (e.g. explaining the Trackback functionality someone asked a few days ago, which somehow exists, but without any traces of documentation). A quite easy approach could be to create *one* single page explaining the concepts behind this ("why which feature is managed where and how"). Another, but probably unrealistic approach would be to write an administrative interfacee which should be task (and not technically) oriented. Because of this, IMHO the documentation is crucial; a friendly usability (whith a task-oriented interface) would be better, of course, but the world isn't perfect anyway; with an accourate manual and working examples one can at least *try* to make things work; but if the documentation is out of date or incomplete, you have to understand the code to use the beast. And that's something beyond the scope of most people trying to set up a MediaWiki installation. Since MediaWiki is Open Source and anyone could at least try to update the documentation, or draft some kind of administrative interface, there is not much to criticize but ourselves. However, having tried to start a complete and systematic rewrite of the documentation a few months ago myself, I learned that this can't be done in a convenient amount of time, not if the manual is supposed to be well-written, easy to understand, and should contain tested examples, and go deeply into discussion of important administrative aspects like security, replication, and high availability . Even if I'd write this im my native tongue (which would hopefully sound clearer than this mail), it would take approximately 9 to 12 months for a small group of people (1-2 writers, 1 techy, 1 spell checker/editor), and require a considerable amount of research, and result in a 900-pages-book to be printed most favourably by O'Reilly ;) The bottomline: The Wiki collaborative authoring priciple seems to work well for information which can be segmented in distinct particles (like Wikipedia articles). It seems to work less for information with some degree of required linearity (like a manual, or a textbook, which starts with the basics, finishes with advanved stuff, and has to be consistent, coherent, and cohesive in itself). Since it's improbable that one single person will do the task, the real challenge I see is how to utilize the Wiki priciple for the creation of a considerable larger and more complex document like the MediaWiki manual... Just my thoughts, Regards from Berlin, -asb

Let's take your "looking for docs on changing the logo" as an example, then: 1. I browse to http://www.mediawiki.org 2. I click Help 3. Under "for System Administrators", I choose "Layout customization" - the text next to it informs me that that includes information on changing the logo 4. Under, "How do I change the logo...", I find that the logo is set via the $wgLogo variable in LocalSettings.php. That section also explains to me how I could edit the CSS to tweak the appearance, positioning or even boolean display of the logo. Searching in the main and Help namespaces of http://www.mediawiki.org for "logo" returns several results, the first of which is relevant. Rob Church On 28/11/05, Luis Villa <luis(a)cyber.law.harvard.edu> wrote:

It would also help if there was a page in the documentation listing all the meta pages that are user interface pages. There's a big long list of them if you go to Special:Allpages and change to namespace 8. However, there are more that are NOT listed here in the default installation, but are redlinks. For example, Community Portal, Searching, Searchresulttext, Protected page guidelines, just to list a few. All of these are empty or non-existant in the default installation. A map of meta pages and the pages they link to that are hardcoded and burried in the user interface would be quite helpful. (Hmm, I wonder how hard it would be to make a graphvis of that automatically.)

On 29/11/05, Steven Dick <kg4ydw(a)gmail.com> wrote: Um, you mean Special:Allmessages ? Clearly, the documentation doesn't mention that enough times yet... -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

On 30/11/05, Steven Dick <kg4ydw(a)gmail.com> wrote: OK, no need for accusations - I read what you said, and I know what Special:Allmessages is and does, but I misunderstood what you were asking for. I *thought* you were talking about pages which were literally *part of* the interface; these should all be in the MediaWiki: namespace, be listed in Special:Allmessages, and have defaults built into the PHP files and entered into the database on install. Any exceptions to this are, AFAIK, bugs - there may be some due to things which predate that system, for instance, but they can and should be fixed. I now realise that what you were actually talking about is pages which are *linked to* from various places in the default interface messages, and you are quite right that there is no way of automatically listing those. You mean [[Project:Protected page guidelines]], linked from the default [[MediaWiki:protectedpagewarning]]; kinda pedantic, but important were you/someone to actually write up the kind of list you're suggesting. Well, like I say, actual UI messages should all have defaults - even if there is no MediaWiki:... page for something, the software will fall back to the version in the PHP source, so there is no real need for an extra list of those. The point about pages linked to *from* those defaults is a separate one, and any list of those that "need tweaking" will be somewhat subjective - though that doesn't rule out it being useful. On 30/11/05, Arthur Guy <Arthur(a)assys.net> wrote: This sounds like a rather good idea - and as you say, one which anyone with a fresh install could do. In fact, it would probably be as simple as copying the list from [[Special:Wantedpages]] on a new install and editting it around a little; if that doesn't work, searching the source of Special:Allmessages to spot redlinks ought to be pretty easy too. If anyone fancies doing this, and putting the result on meta.wikimedia.org (and/or www.mediawiki.org ?) I'm sure it will be appreciated by others. -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

On 30/11/05, Rob Church <robchur(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ah, I didn't realise that. Thought there might be a catch. :( -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

Here's a starting list if pages that need site appropriate content, most in MediaWiki namespace of course. I apologize in advance for any typos, since I"m not using cut and paste on this. I don't pretend this list is complete, just a start. Some of these are already well documented in the MediaWiki documentation. sidebar (and items linked from it such as...) mainpage Community portal Current events Protected page Protected page guidelines Image use policy Copyrights Searching (from Searchresulttext) nogomatch (I replaced the default with a version of what is on wikipedia)

On 11/30/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sorry to snap at you, and thanks for correcting the errors, pedanticly or not. That's what I get for writing to maling lists when I really should be sleeping. :) Part of your confusion is that I meant both things, probably because I'm confused about what I want. It's been a while since I set up the wiki, so weak memory on this stuff does not help. I *thought* you were talking about pages which were literally *part I'm not sure that this isn't the case. As another poster pointed out, there are pages that need to be site appropriate. I think I've listed most of them in my posting to the list, but I'm sure I missed a few. The key here is prioritizing what needs changing -- things that are critical to a site's layout and purpose, vs. all messages in the system. But most of the pages that bother me I think are linked to from the system messages, which is why they got missed.

...and it's only really decent to point out here that if you can (if you have shell access to the server), you could set that back to true and run the rebuildMessages.php maintenance script to update the MediaWiki namespace from your language file. Rob Church On 30/11/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins(a)gmail.com> wrote: