[Mediawiki-l] Any leads on a basic wiki setup-and-configure instruction manual?

[Brianna Laugher]

On 06/06/07, Monahon, Peter B. <Peter.Monahon at 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