Extension requests/Before 2007
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Really old stuff
Interface
- Contact form to be integrated in a wiki page. For example: <contact>user@domain.com</contact> or <contact> username</contact>
- Guestbook-Extension - Form for new entry. Saved and displayed on a protected page.
- was added by me - see Guestbook extension for more information (--Mcmilk 21:50, 26 October 2006 (UTC))
- Spacing control (double spaced, expand the standard distance between paragraphs, etc)
- Tag clouds
- More sidebars besides toolbox and navigation
- See $wgNavigationLinks and MediaWiki:Sidebar for adding to existing sidebar.
- Color coding users according to user groups
- Interactive image editing
- Interactive diagram editing (i.e. Gliffy integration)
- Include special page that has name of last edited/last added article of a category. (you can try using editable templates)
- Non-article related rating system
- Not sure about what you mean by "Non-article related' but here's a rating system: Extension:Rating --Sanford.poon 05:16, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
- An Address/Contact Book (with vCard import/export)
- Allow registered non-admins to rollback "page blanking"
- 'Add this article to Category' (perhaps in toolbar?) with dropdown list of available categories
- Similar: On category pages, an input field similar to inputbox that lets users "Add a page to this category" (redirects to blank edit page, with the referring category already inserted)
- A way to allow users to build a list on the side bar of their favorite pages in the wiki
- Collapse/Expand sections (Tree View). This would be particularly useful for the Wikireason Logic Tree
- Display the pages as a map. i.e. site map, or even better mind map - something like freemind. based on the links in the page
- When the Special:Userrights page comes up, it should give you an option to choose the users from the list in the database. Yes, I know that you can go to Special:Listusers to see all the users, but this would be more convenient for small wikis.
- You should be able to set a default user level for new users using the Mediawiki interface.
- Already known text input format, such as BBCode and/or other frequently used formats
- Support for appending/prepending/creating a wiki page via email. (i.e. Send an email to PageTitle+create@wikihost.com)
Admin
- Block edits to user pages except by that user and sysops
- Block edits to free defined user group
- Support for alternative databases: Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc
- PostgreSQL is supported as of now, Oracle was supported earlier on, but it was dropped eventually. --Sayuri 13:40, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
- Account activation requires email verification  OK
- Request account for wikis that don't allow account creation
- Allow rollbacks of rollbacks  OK
- Restrict editing of certain pages to certain users
- Global search and replace
Special page
- Special page to revert all edits by a certain user or IP address (within a time frame)
- Special page to allow deletion of users
- Extension:Deleteuser - with a fair amount of hackery, it might work. --Sayuri 13:40, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
- Extension to allow sysops to delete older revisions of an article  OK
- Special page to allow sending email to all users (or specific groups) of a wiki  OK
- Special page to reset passwords without using e-mail
- Special page to rename/edit an user
- To rename, see Extension:Renameuser --Sayuri 13:40, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
- See User:Eep for many special page-specific requests
Usage statistics
- Provide a dump of the apache access logs see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/logs.html#accesslog This will allow the calculation of page hits for any article.
- isn't there already a hitcounter on the articles? --Flominator 12:28, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
- there is also a google analytics extension. 70.103.216.66 20:54, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
- Google Analytics doesn't pull from the apache logs. For my own wiki, there can be a 400 to 1,500 unique visitor difference between the logs and analytics based on how it pulls. --99.151.168.185 13:12, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Uncategorized
- Internationalization: Allow pages to appear differently for each browser language, keep all translations in one place
- Make dynamic content transclusion easier
- Polling that can be displayed on article page (see meta:Poll)
- Guestbook-style interface (you can do something like this using the regular wiki)
- Ability to replace talk page with real forum instead of wiki page (see Extension:Forum extension)
- Javascript to allow tabbing in textarea
- Ability to attach files to pages
- This... is a textbook example of an ambiguious request. The capacity already exists to store image data inside wiki and to link/display images on pages. The very notion of 'attaching' an image to a specific wiki page runs contrary to the very purpose for which wiki exists, which is the collaborative effort and shared media resources. -Verlocs 12.104.195.32
This functionality already exists in MediaWiki. In the LocalSettings.php file is a setting to indicate what file extensions to exclude (all others will be included). If you need a file to be included, that is not already included, you can just change this variable.
- If you look here http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Attaching+Files+to+a+Page I believe you will see what he means. I presently use Mediawiki and like it just fine but my boss thinks "Having to upload and then link the media file into a page is too much work. I'd like to have a "folder" of files where I can just upload crap." pmarcus 15 MAR 2008
- I think he means attach any type of file, not just images. im also looking for this functionality. seems clear to me -AaronC
- Highlighting terms on a page based on URL/search referral
- Filtering on alluser list based on user rights
- Conditional logic in templates (see Winter scripting language for a possibility)
- A macro to insert mail addresses that will be displayed in obfuscated form if the reader is not logged in, and as a proper mailto: link otherwise
- Grabbing the latest posts from a phpBB forum and a Wordpress blog.
- See Wordpress Export for Wikipedia and play with the WK.php script Renmiri 17:36, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
- Grabbing any RSS feed and include it in a box
- See Wordpress Export for Wikipedia, it gives you the XML format to import XML into Wiki using the built in Special:Import Wiki page, RSS is XML and any XSLT program can taylor it to output the XML / Wiki format Renmiri 17:40, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
- Simple spreadsheet functionality (example: summing a column of a table)
- Cooking recipe extension would be nice. It should be possible to use Wiki markup language to store recipes in common format to MediaWiki. It should allow storing informatino about recipe's ingredients, cooking instructions etc. It would be nice, if you could also store picture from food to recipe. Any directions how to proceed?
- Dynamic creation/update of a Google SiteMap format file to speed Google Index updating.
- see ThinkLemon for an edited version of the Google sitemap generator. --Elliotgoodrich 15:47, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
- For protected pages allow users to 'edit' them. Edits are not shown on the protected page but in a different page. An administrator can then view the edits and accept or deny the edits. Accepted edits are automatically made to the protected page.
- Should have an extension to allow users to write definitions of word inside <definition> tags, and have these words automatically alphabetically added to a database of words that users can scan through. Sometimes you don't want to have a separate page for each word as users may not know the exact word for which they are looking.
- Some sort of bulk import of HTML files would be handy
- RandomLine extension. Usage: <randomLine>Article</randomLine>. Outputs a random line from specified article.
Agenda
Hi,
I'm looking for an Agenda Extension.
What I want it to to is to collect all pages with the name Year-month-day name of event, eg. 2006-04-15 Inserted request from a certain day on, into the future, and display these event-titles in a neat little table.
I want to have this, because we want to migrate http://wikimaas.org to mediawiki, but we are very satisfied with the way our calendar works now.
Besides this aggregating, there should also be a reasonably straight forward method of entering events, but I guess the aggregating will be somewhat more work.
Can maybe somebody help us out?
Thanx
Daniel wikimaas --145.99.202.92 04:12, 16 April 2006
- â <SSPecteR> Im sorry but i Didnt understood What you want to do. Can you provide a more detailed explanation on this? Examples would be great.â Monday,, 05:04 (UTC)
- Just check out http://wikimaas.org . On the right side is an Agenda ("Upcoming events:") which shows all the events happening in the near future. it is quite easy to administrate (http://wikimaas.org/AddEvent & http://wikimaas.org/Calendar). Is there anything similar for the MediaWiki?
- I have written something that I think will do what you want. See Calendar extension and special page -- Barrylb 19:29, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
- Looks like you have gone with another Wiki engine... -- Barrylb 19:52, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
- No, we're still with Oddmuse, and pondereing on some other issues before we move over to mediawiki. But your calendar looks like exactly what we need, thanks! D
- whats acutally the difference with Calendar Extension extended?
- My extension has each event on its own page so it can be more flexible with presentation, like producing the list of upcoming events. Also the other one has serious problems with MediaWiki's page caching that make it unusable for me. I avoid that issue by using a Special page to show different months or to show all events for one date. -- Barrylb 17:32, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
- whats acutally the difference with Calendar Extension extended?
- No, we're still with Oddmuse, and pondereing on some other issues before we move over to mediawiki. But your calendar looks like exactly what we need, thanks! D
- Looks like you have gone with another Wiki engine... -- Barrylb 19:52, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
iCalendar
Hello, What I am looking for is an iCalendar (or iCal, .ics format) parser. Basically what I want to do is include google (and other) calendars into our wiki using the iCal standard. This way it can be easy to include calendars of others onto our wiki. I have done some research and found phpiCalendar very suitable for the job. I'll try if I can make this working as an extension.. What do you think?
ps: site delft.campuswiki.nl
Thatcher 21:29, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
- Update: I have worked on the phpIcalendar to see if it is possible to include the entire script into mediawiki. But this is not so easy, and maybe not even something you want. Instead I have made an extension (beta) that includes the phpIcalendar as an Iframe, And I have adjusted the phpIcalendar template to be nice and clean and display a list only. When in a further state I will publish it here somewhere. Thatcher 16:44, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
- This phpiCalendar as an extension for mediawiki is EXACTLY what I am looking for! I'm shure, a lot of people would appreciate to have such a calendar.. you should create it ;) --dvL 09:21, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
Restricted Articles
<SSPecteR> Hi. Im using a Agenda extension in my wiki to allow all users to create their own agendas. But for that work I need some articles to be viewed only by the user who created it. As Mediawiki project isn't giving any step to provide by-Password or by-User Protected Articles, I wonder if is possible to make a extension for it. It don't need it to be 100% secure, just functional. So I will put this section for anyone interested to share ideas of how it could be implemented. â Tuersday,, 08:29 (UTC)
Ideas
Here are ideas of how to implement security on Article by extension.
Restricted by user- Restricted Articles could only be seen by a whitelisted user.
- whitelist could be saved in MySQL, or in the script itself.
- extension should have access to DB
- restriction for edit using the whitelist is needed, and cannot be implemented inside an extension
Restricted by password- Any user could see the article, but the contents would be encrypted.
- a decrypt mecanism is needed
- restriction for edit still needed
Works in development
List any extensions, add-ons, full modifications etc... that implement, will implement, or allow implementation of restricted articles.
- The extension Page access restriction with MediaWiki is the closest thing to what you want to do but it does not allow specification of individual user access to certain pages. It would be possible to adapt for your needs if you know what you are doing. -- Barrylb 14:32, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
- Group Based Access Control Extension has more features for user control and shoud suit your needs. Make a group for each user and the user can decide if he is the only editor for that page by include the group access string.--GunterS 22:41, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
- BizzWiki platform
- Lockdown gives you a lot of these features --Asset 13:15, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
Commentaries
One part of this is easy: you can use a userCan hook to check for 'read' and 'edit' actions and check that a user is allowed to do those actions for each page. If you had users store their agenda on their user page or subpage of their user page you could check that the title of article they are editing or viewing starts with their username.
The complication is that pages are also viewable through certain Special pages, such as search and export. The easiest option is to restrict access to special pages to administrators. If you still want to use the built-in Special:Search page then you would need to hack the code so that it does not allow users to search in user namespace. That probably would not be too hard to do.
If you want any help with those things let me know. -- Barrylb 20:31, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
I have an easy solution for this, because I have the same problem. I use the "Simple Security"-Extension together with a selfmade template. {{lock}}. Inside the template I have the call to the Simple Security extension and a parameter: {{#security:edit|{{{1}}} }}. And a "Sorry, you´re not allowed to do this" message. By this, any user who wants to make sure others can´t edit a page he/she started just needs to call the "lock" template by putting his/her username as parameter {{lock|Username}}. Putting additional user names or names of user groups into the parameter seperated by "," will make the page editable by those users or groups.217.94.236.47 16:41, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
Category Search
Hi,
I'm looking for an extension that will search only within category. Is such a thing possible? I might be able too create it myself if I had a bit better of an understanding of how categories are stored...although I doubt it :) --Wease 06:58, 1 July 2006
- I'm looking for exactly the same thing. FOr example I will have a category of music artiss and I want users to just type in and find what they're looking for in that category.Fointy 15:44, 18 August July 2006 (UTC)
- Hello I also look for such a thing. Is there any implementation right now? I mean something like the category search of ebay.
GetWiki Features
I'm looking for an extension that can import Wikipedia articles to a MediaWiki installation automatically. GetWiki is so poorly documented that it is impossible to get it to work without a doctorate from Harvard. Does an extension to provide that feature already exist? I really need it for my wiki I'm attempting to start that will be expand upon Wikipedia's pro wrestling articles because while they are often very good, Wikipedia policies are holding them back from their full potential and I think a more specialized Wiki could improve the content. 205.166.61.142 21:34, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
- Try using Special:Export and Special:Import -- Barrylb 04:45, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Is there anyway to dump by category, or extract the dump by category. So for example if I want all articles in the category football. I could extract them to import into another mediawiki?
81.179.74.26 20:25, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
- Yes, current (1.10) Versions of Mediawiki Export have a "include from Category" field. --Purodha Blissenbach 09:48, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
WikiSQL
Confluence's wiki has an SQL macro that allows you to insert SQL code and display the output as HTML tables or even charts. It is really nice. Security is controled by the application and configuration of the data source. It would be handy if Wikimedia had this too... --4.158.210.88 09:48, 11 July 2006
- Have a look at SemanticMediaWiki, especially the
<ask>âŚ</ask>
syntax, and at Wikidata --Purodha Blissenbach 09:53, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
mediaWIKI universal wiki
Hi, I'm proposing an extension that allows users to use other wikis syntax in mediawiki. I'm using alot of time to manually translate dokuwiki documents to mediawiki syntax format. And I'm guessing alot of other people are doing the same thing. This could be done with special wiki tags like:
<wiki lang='docuwiki'> ==== Header ==== **fattext** {{image3321.jpg:imagetext}} </wiki>
--193.180.169.114 00:48, 5 August 2006
- Instead of a manual conversion, you might want to try exporting the DocuWiki document as HTML (make sure you remove the navigation links, etc.), then convert it to MediaWiki syntax using HTML::WikiConverter, and import it into MediaWiki. This was the process that I used for converting a UseMod wiki with a few hundred pages to MediaWiki.--JohnMcDonnell 14:41, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
File Upload as Part of Article Creation?
Is anyone aware of any work to link the file uploading process with article creation / editing?
Basically I'd like an image file or pdf to be uploaded along with articles of a particular type, and I'd prefer users not have to go through the separate step of uploading the file, and then creating the article / linking it up.
Additional discussion here I'd eventually like to link this up to Barrylb's Article Editing Form, see my request below.
Any thoughts are appreciated. I'd hate to reinvent the wheel. Thanks Blckdmnd99 15:46, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
- It's a good idea, i think the article creation will be more easy for new editor, if anyone can help ;) --86.201.214.76 11:44, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
What about generalizing the idea: an article may have attachments, files or images. At the end of the page there should be a "Files" section by default, with a simple link "Attach file or image". This is VERY useful! DekiWiki has implemented this feature: http://doc.opengarden.org/DekiWiki. Images are automatically listed as thumbnails. --Kaiplusuwe 18:31, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
Ajax Vote
Hello, Ive tried my best but I must be missing something. I run a DS homebrew community - Each release is given its own page.
- I want to give each title its own vote.. eg placing <ajaxvote>Extension_requests/Before_2007</ajaxvote> into the template for Games. Would obviously place a seperate vote into every game page.
- I found this piece of PHP http://wwwa.masuga.com/thelab/ajaxrate/
- It has support for multiple ratings based on ID. (my plan is too base them off the name of the page its currently on.)
Does anyone know of something like this? or can they hack this into an extension. --58.84.69.227 17:06, 12 August 2006
The code for standard html is <?php include('functions.php');Â ?> above the header
with
<?php rating_bar('3b');Â ?> at the location.
- Take a look at Extension:JSKitRating Jean-Lou Dupont 17:00, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
Ticketing
Im setting up a wiki to form a new information system on systems infrastructure at my company. The structure of documentation itself poses no problem, but one thing I want to implement does. I want to set up a knowledge (error) base. This should provide easy documentation of faults and make retrieval of this information almost immediate. Additionally, referring to a problem between teams by using the unique identifier can make communication easier im thinking along the lines of KB_Article:[numbered_identifier]. This would require a component to maintain a counter within wiki and auto-assign this number to newly created kb articles, preferably forcing the layout of the article (see extension request from Blckdmnd99, will look into options provided by barrylb) As much as i would like to avoid the analogy, something along the lines of the Microsoft Knowledgebase There are solutions available but those require a full implementation of a service management tool with limited dump-to-wiki functionality for solutions. A simple extension however would suffice.
All help is appreciated --VinceV 03:53, 17 August 2006
Can I rephrase the request? - may we have a class of articles with states and automatic enumeration? The media already provides all the necessary elements, it is the supporting tools to manage (spawn, sort, assign-to-user, change state) these articles that is "new".
Most of the required tools are already supplied by MediaWiki_Bulletin_Board, what will be missing is support for TYPE and autoenumeration and perhaps more fine grained STATES. I'm off to play with the current Beta.
And, yes, "Knowledge base" is the wrong analogy :-) Wikipedia is a knowledge database!
- MediaWiki already generates a primary key called
page_id
for each new article. You can see it if you dump yourwikidb
database withmysqldump
. Here's the table definition where it appears:
-- -- Table structure for table `page` -- DROP TABLE IF EXISTS page; CREATE TABLE page ( page_id int(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment, page_namespace int(11) NOT NULL, page_title varchar(255) character set latin1 collate latin1_bin NOT NULL, page_restrictions tinyblob NOT NULL, page_counter bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL default '0', page_is_redirect tinyint(1) unsigned NOT NULL default '0', page_is_new tinyint(1) unsigned NOT NULL default '0', page_random double unsigned NOT NULL, page_touched char(14) character set latin1 collate latin1_bin NOT NULL default '', page_latest int(8) unsigned NOT NULL, page_len int(8) unsigned NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (page_id), UNIQUE KEY name_title (page_namespace,page_title), KEY page_random (page_random), KEY page_len (page_len) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
- I don't know if there is any user-level access to
page_id
of the type you seem to be asking for. Also, thepage_id
sequence would be discontinuous for one type of page, because it would increment for every new page on the wiki. You might look at TWiki which from what I have read has more structured wiki features and support for wiki applications than MediaWiki does, at the moment anyway. Perhaps with all the corporate interest in MediaWiki resulting from the overwhelming popularity of Wikipedia, MediaWiki (or perhaps a separate enterprise version thereof) will evolve into something more like TWiki, in terms of having the kind of structured wiki features the typical corporate user expects. Teratornis 05:41, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
It may be a bit late now but just for fun I made an extension that handles the automatic incrementing of article numbers. See Extension:Knowledgebase. It adds a special page called Special:Knowledgebase that queries existing pages in the KB namespace and redirects to the next-higher article number. Hope it is useful for someone. -- Barrylb 04:12, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
Ajax inline editing
It would be nice to have an ajax inline editing extension. --71.159.156.143 16:29, 22 August 2006
Copy TOC
Id like to display the TOC of page A in page B.. eg the TOC with direct links without the content --150.101.65.56 07:23, 6 September 2006
Select categories and display pages
Is there an extension that shows a site wehre checkboxes with all the categories are so that you can pcik whatever you want to and the sites in the selected cats are shown? Thanks! mediawiki-1 [at] wikiplant [dot] org --172.173.150.244 03:42, 12 September 2006
Spreadsheet
A simple spreadsheet facility might prove useful. It could even be tied in with an existing graphing extension. -- 87.102.6.183 16:39, 18 September 2006
My two cents Some additions to this request
A basic spreadsheet style table layout that is (at least somewhat) WYSIWYG in the edit mode would be very helpful. We use simple printed spreadsheets to track lists of tasks on paper, then someone has to update the digital versions. I'd like to use MediaWiki to do this so my staff can enter the data themselves so that the project data is updated in real time and available for all to see and edit without leaving their desks. I don't need a full blown project management app, just an editable table that will not confuse the heck out of the average Joe. I'm not sure how feasible that is, but I'm pretty sure lots of folks would put it to good use if it were available. 1-10-2008
Review Extensions
- I'm looking for a simple star rating review extension that could be used on basically any topic (restaurants, stores, music, bars, even people, anything). I'd like it to look like the one on the right side of this site (I spoke to the creater of that site, and he isn't prepared to release the source code yet). Any suggestions? --Mijunkin 05:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
There is a new Rating script at LeerWiki.nl. This script has your stars and is powered by AJAX.
- There is something called Review.php which is in SVN but doesn't appear to have any documentation on Meta. There is also this: http://www.wikihow.com/WikiHow:RateArticle-Extension . But these are both like one rating corresponding to each page, which might not be exactly what you're looking for. 128.250.80.15 09:07, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
- The solution available from LeerWiki.nl is not working with MediaWiki 1.8.2. It generates a blank page, meaning the wiki can not display any pages anymore. Seems that everyone with 1.8.2 who tried it, faced the same issue. Anyone can help fixing this would be real great help. Alain --66.131.228.50 04:52, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
- Not precisely the same thing but, try: Extension:Rating --Sanford.poon 05:23, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
Templates used in article
When you edit an article, below the edit window is a list of all used templates. In some cases we restrict edit rights on a page, thus the user can not see the used template list.
I would like to provide a link in the toolbox section below "what links here": "what templates are used" that gives the list of the templates for the current article.
--GunterS 22:31, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Time Management/Tracking
I am looking for a wiki extension that can somehow tie into the time tracking. Like users log-in to their account and register their time that they have worked on certain projects. Based on that certain reports should be able to generate. I have limited knowledge of wiki therefore would love to know if something is already out there or a freeware that can merge with wiki to do this. --71.166.144.131 17:37, 22 December 2006
Wikitext help annotator
I request an extension which parses the wikitext on a page, and for each wiki markup code or construct on the page, generates link(s) to the help topic(s) that describe it. This would make learning wiki markup much easier for new users, by letting them analyze pages they find interesting, rather than forcing them to read through an entire manual to pick out the few items they want to learn about at a given instant. A natural way for humans to learn is to see another human doing something, and ask, "How do you do that?" Unfortunately, on almost every computer system in existence, we cannot ask the computer, "How do you do that?" Instead we have to undertake a research project to reverse-engineer what we see the computer doing.
Wikipedia has been able to sort of cherry pick its users, by allowing the whole world access, from which a few highly motivated individuals are willing to learn wiki markup the hard way (read the entire manual, or most of it, work through tutorials, spend much time searching the manual to look up help topics for each markup problem).
In contrast, in a corporate setting, a wiki must attract a high percentage of employees to become viable. The members of an organization are, on average, unlikely to be as interested in learning some complex new system as Wikipedia's most enthusiastic users were. Thus a corporate wiki needs an acceptance rate among employees which is many times higher than Wikipedia's acceptance rate has been in the entire population.
Since the largest barrier to acceptance is having to learn the wiki markup language, anything which makes learning the markup language easier should increase acceptance, and save costly employee time.
The following example illustrates what I mean. Here is some sample wikitext, which initially may be daunting for the new wiki user:
== Sample wikitext == Welcome to {{SITENAME}}, a [[w:Wiki|wiki]] running on [[MediaWiki]] {{CURRENTVERSION}}, with {{NUMBEROFUSERS}} registered [[Special:Listusers|users]]. See [[Special:Version]] for more information about the MediaWiki version and the installed [[metaw:MediaWiki extensions|extensions]]. Signed: ~~~~ == See also == *[[Extension]] *[{{fullurl:Special:Allpages|namespace=12}} All {{SITENAME}} help] [[Category:Help pages|{{PAGENAME}}]]
The above example is not intended to be a masterpiece of wiki design, but merely a collection of code likely to confuse a new user. For a new user to understand all the markup, he or she has to locate and read all these help topics:
== Sample wikitext ==
- Section heading: Help:Wikitext#Organizing your writing
{{SITENAME}}
- Magic word for the sitename:
[[w:Wiki|wiki]]
- Interwiki link:
[[MediaWiki]]
- Wikilink: Help:Link#Wikilinks
{{CURRENTVERSION}}
- Magic word for the current version of MediaWiki: Help:Magic words#Statistics
{{NUMBEROFUSERS}}
- Magic word for the current number of registered users: Help:Magic words#Statistics
[[Special:Listusers|users]]
- a wikilink to a special page that lists all users: Help:Special pages#Special pages for all users
[[Special:Version]]
- a wikilink to a special page that lists the installed extensions: Help:Special pages#Special pages for all users
[[MediaWiki extensions|extensions]]
- Wikilink: Help:Link#Wikilinks
~~~~
- User signature: Help:Talk page#Using talk pages
== See also ==
- Section heading: Help:Wikitext#Organizing your writing
*
- Unordered list item: Help:List#List basics
[[Extension]]
- Wikilink: Help:Link#Wikilinks
*
- Unordered list item: Help:List#List basics
[{{fullurl:Special:Allpages|namespace=12}} All {{SITENAME}} help]
- External link to the same project, with magic words:
[[Category:Help pages|{{PAGENAME}}]]
- Category link with page name as sort key:
{{PAGENAME}}
- Magic word for the page name: Help:Magic words#Page names and related info
We cannot make those topics much easier to read, but we can certainly make them easier to find.
Currently the topics are difficult for a new user to find, because many wikitext codes make poor search keywords, and the new user does not know the proper names for them yet, nor where they are in the manual.
However, the MediaWiki parser must know what all the markup codes mean, because it can render the page as XHTML. So why not write a program that renders wiki markup into help link annotation?
The annotation could be in any of these forms:
- A big list of markup codes, brief text descriptions, and links, as in the example above
- A popup window when the user hovers the mouse over a given markup code element or construct
- A display of wiki source, like in the edit window, but with help links on markup code elements or constructs
Oh yeah, and the extension would need to know the site's interwiki link prefix to get to the MediaWiki manuals.
I skimmed through the list of extensions and I did not find anything which seems to do what I'm requesting here. Let me know if I overlooked something; or, if there is no such extension now, whether anyone wants to try writing it. I don't know PHP yet, but I could help with the big job of manually compiling a table showing the correspondence between wiki markup items and help links that describe them. Teratornis 22:12, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
Disclaimer
I know some may wrongly think Restricted Articles hurt wiki idea of content being altered by any users, but not all web content are meant to be viewed by anyone, and I bet many other wiki administrators felt a need for it once.