You wrote .. " Say a user asks me to change the logo - where do I find the control for that? "

Try the FAQs

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ#How_do_I_customize_the_logo_in_ the_top_left_corner.3F_Can_I.3F

DSig David Tod Sigafoos | SANMAR Corporation PICK Guy 206-770-5585 davesigafoos@sanmar.com

-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Monahon, Peter B. Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 13:55 To: mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?

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Peter

I have read many of the messages on the list of the last few weeks and resisted jumping in until I saw whether you were going to find some untapped vein of knowledge or, more likely, you would need to do a lot of the legwork yourself with hints and near answers.

I do find this mailing list VERY useful but typically not because I get the exact answer I need but more usually because it sends me off in the right direction to find it myself. This is fine with me and I have learnt a ton in the last 3+ months with help from some of the regular posters here.

The lack of comprehensive documentation, setup instructions or the like whilst being somewhat frustrating is something that playing with Mediawiki you have to learn to accept, for now. I really don't know anyone that has the time to devote to building the type of documentation you are looking for BUT I do suspect that if sponsorship were available there would be candidates. I seem to recall you were with the USPTO, sponsorship of an open source project from such an organization would be interesting indeed.

This isn't to say that people are only motivated solely by money but they have to pay their bills which personally I find absolutely fine.

I myself needed some extensive changes made to the Mediawiki UI and after spending a few days looking I realized that Mediawiki is a complete beast when it comes to the construction of the UI and its associated CSS.

I took the admittedly easy way out and simply got an expert (Jim Wilson, cant recommend him enough!) to author a custom skin (www.scribas.com/archives) which does everything we need. The site is currently in stealth mode and offline but you get a feel for what it will look like.

The easier parts of Mediawiki, for me, have always been the data driven components. Data is data is data and so I have been able to change pretty much whatever I want by virtue of the fact that the data is stored in a known and well documented system, MySQL. Actually, on that note we are soon to be looking to migrate the index from MySQL to Lucene for fast cross-site searching/indexing of Mediawiki and Drupal.

Anyway, the reason for my post. I could be way off track here but I suspect that a lot of the, admittedly logical, requests you have generated whilst being perfectly reasonable within the black box, vendor supported world are just a little ahead of their time in the Mediawiki/open source world.

Be it Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Mediawiki or whatever open source project I think you will always hear gripes about the documentation and feedback in the event of bug/problem. I don't think mediawiki is any worse or better in this regard and in fact having tested three other wikis I would say it is without doubt the most solid out there.

So...the solution? I don't think there is one in the short term. As much as I would love to see comprehensive documentation I wont be holding my breath. Instead, I research, ask questions and generally make progress with help from this mailing list. Ideal? No, but you pays your money and takes your choice. I could have gone to socialtext and got a fully supported wiki but the cost would have been significant. Mediawiki is 'free' but comes with a sometimes costly lack of support framework.

Oh, and the reason, in my humble opinion, for the fact that you see several names for the same entity is possibly quite simple. There are hundreds of contributors, each using slightly different phraseology.

Regards, Paul

On 6/5/07 4:55 PM, "Monahon, Peter B." Peter.Monahon@USPTO.GOV wrote:

...

...

Peter Blaise wrote: ... I'm trying to compile a "see this on a MediaWiki screen, edit it ... HERE" ... listing for MediaWiki administration. Can anyone link me to a list that addresses these on-screen MediaWiki words and their synonyms, and shows where to edit/control their appearance ...

...

Jan wrote: I'm not exactly clear on what you want. Perhaps you're looking for [[Special:Allmessages]]?

Thanks for your question and suggestion, Jan.

Wow, there's 145 pages of unintelligible documentation at http://yourwiki.com/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&ot=html and http://yourwiki.com/index.php?title=Special:Allmessages&ot=php - no wonder it's hard to find quick answers for MediaWiki inquires.

By the way, that series of pages is also a good example of the misaligned jargon syndrome within MediaWiki community:

Go to [[Special:Allmessages]] and find a screen that says not "Special:Allmessages" but instead says "System messages"

... so someone would find it by searching for ... which term?

Anyway, there are some synonyms in it which help resolve some ambiguities, but no directions to where to control the on-screen MediaWiki parts (not the contents of user contributed articles, but the on-screen parts of MediaWiki itself).

What I want is to know how to find what controls anything on a MediaWiki screen.

Say a user asks me to change the logo - where do I find the control for that?

Say the next user wants me to change the wording of the tabs across the top - where's the control for that?

And so on, for everything we can see in a default MediaWiki installation.

Example: I open the manual for my camera and the first thing it does is tell me the "names of the parts". Then when they say, "open the battery door," I can look at their map and see what they are talking about. And they don't sometimes refer to it as the "power source compartment". No, it's always the "battery door". When they say, "look at the top panel lcd," I then know they call it the "top panel lcd" when I contact anyone for help. It's never the "horizontal display". No, it's always the "top panel lcd" wherever it's referred to.

MediaWiki, however, has no such master "names of parts" page that I can find, making it hard to find the control for any MediaWiki screen element I'm staring right at! And when we do have something on screen with an apparent name, it seems to be controlled by something under another name, such as, "discussion" is really "talk" and:

on-screen "navigation" ... = MediaWiki:Sidebar ... = http://%7Byour wiki's URL}/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar

And so on. That's why I asked for help finding the names of the MediaWiki parts, such as:

• on-screen "search"

... = (synonym?) ... = place for a wiki admin to edit/control it

• on-screen "toolbox" =

... = (synonym?) ... = place for a wiki admin to edit/control it

Because I want to CONTROL those on-screen MediaWiki elements, and I can't find what that are called. As, as exampled above, the name on screen is not used in any support documentation I can search at MediaWiki.org. So, c'mon folks, if you know or can find it, please share links at MediaWiki.org or create it and then share links! Thanks!

--

...

...

Peter B. wrote: ... and so on for ALL editable page elements in a MediaWiki installation.

...

Michael wrote: Install a utility like Firebug for Firefox and enable it. That will allow you to see every element on the screen and see what bit of CSS it uses. Useful if you want to change the skin in any way. It will also allow you to see any other HTML/CSS/Script stuff you can search for in the various php files that make up Mediawiki.

Great, Mike!

... now if I can only get permission to install Firefox ...!!!

However, some MediaWiki page elements are controlled directly by typing

mediawiki:xxxxx

or

speciak:xxxxxxxx

and son on, for some entries into the

"search _____ [go] [search]"

area (whatever that area is called), yet some on-screen MediaWiki elements require finding, creating or changing lines in

xxxsetting.php

and now you suggest looking for

xxxx.cs

files as they may be the source

... dang, Mike, spread the target w-i-d-e so it's impossible for me to hit, why dontchya?

:-(

I'll see if I can install Firefox on a USB drive ...

• Peter Blaise

...fighting the good fight, trying to make MediaWiki taste good for the users around me...

---

MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

On 06/06/07, Monahon, Peter B. Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov wrote:

Anyway, there are some synonyms in it which help resolve some ambiguities, but no directions to where to control the on-screen MediaWiki parts (not the contents of user contributed articles, but the on-screen parts of MediaWiki itself).

What I want is to know how to find what controls anything on a MediaWiki screen.

[...]

Say the next user wants me to change the wording of the tabs across the top - where's the control for that?

I can tell in my experience that MediaWiki has poor documentation of this and you won't find any easy guide to this written yet (unless it was done in the last couple of months and I missed it :)). Translators, skin designers and all interface "tweakers" will face this problem of trying to figure out which "system message" (page in the MediaWiki namespace) maps to which message you see on your screen.

So, how I do it: * note the current value of the message * go to Special:Allmessage, use my browser's "find" feature to map the current value to the "current text" column. hopefully there will only be one match. * if there are multiple matches, try and guess from the message name which is the correct one. if I can't guess, try changing one (changing the content of the corresponding MediaWiki: page) and hitting refresh to see if the message on the screen changes. if it does, success. if it doesn't, try the next possible match.

HTH, Brianna