Richards,Michael wrote:

Another related question: is there a way to *link* to an external file on a file system, using perhaps UNC (Universal Naming Convention), e.g. [<\servername\sharename\path\filename> External File] or some such syntax? On some Mediawiki installations other than Wikipedia (e.g. ours) this would be extremely useful to link to non-wiki flat files (e.g. Microsoft Word).

If you enable the file: URL scheme you can do this: file://servername/sharename/path/filename or [file://servername/sharename/path/filename External file]

There's no option for it so you have to make the change manually. In includes/Parser.php there's a function like this: /* private */ function replaceExternalLinks( $text ) { $fname = "Parser::replaceExternalLinks"; wfProfileIn( $fname ); $text = $this->subReplaceExternalLinks( $text, "http", true ); $text = $this->subReplaceExternalLinks( $text, "https", true ); $text = $this->subReplaceExternalLinks( $text, "ftp", false ); $text = $this->subReplaceExternalLinks( $text, "irc", false ); $text = $this->subReplaceExternalLinks( $text, "gopher", false ; $text = $this->subReplaceExternalLinks( $text, "news", alse ); $text = $this->subReplaceExternalLinks( $text, "mailto", false ); wfProfileOut( $fname ); return $text; }

Add in another line to the bunch: $text = $this->subReplaceExternalLinks( $text, "file", false );

(The boolean value controls whether to allow using those external URLs as image links if they edit with '.jpg' or '.gif' etc.) Such file URLs might not work on different platforms, but if you're an all-windows shop it should work consistently.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)