Hello. I'm currently assisting in the setup of a MediaWiki installation, and the project owner has asked that we find a way to disable all talk pages on the wiki. I had thought to assign all talk pages to a category that only sysops could edit, but i thought better of this on reflection, since it would involve coding an extension for it, and it would leave a lot of void links around the place.
The links lead me to my next idea: removing all the links to the talk pages so that no one can access them through normal means. So, I have to ask, where are all the references to talk-page links? I managed to remove the 'my talk' and 'discussion' links for the header and body of the 'recent changes' page, but that's about it so far. I've commented out several other references to them in SkinTemplate and other pages, and even tried turning the 'talk' and 'mytalk' references in the Language.php file into null strings, but to no avail. So, where does MediaWIki build the 'discussion' and 'my talk' links in normal article pages from? Do you have any other suggestions as to how I could achieve this?
Addendum: From what I've seen, I've actually managed to remove them from most namespaces, but the namespaces like NS_MAIN continue to have them. Are these pages generated somewhere else entirely?
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