Glossary of MediaWiki Terms

MediaWiki Manual:Glossary

The following terms have been adapted from Manual:Glossary https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Glossary

Administrator

A user with extra technical privileges for "custodial" work on MediaWiki wikis – specifically, deleting and protecting pages, and blocking abusive users.

Blue link, bluelink

A wikilink to an article that already exists shows up blue (or purple if it has been recently visited by that reader/editor). See also: red link.

Broken link

A link to a nonexistent page, usually colored red, depending on your settings. May also refer to dead links. See also: red link.

Broken redirect

Redirect to a non-existing page. Common opinion is that these should be removed.

Bureaucrat

A MediaWiki administrator who has been entrusted with promoting users to Administrator status.

CamelCase

CamelCase (camel case or camel-case)—originally known as medial capitals—is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter is either upper or lower case

Category

A category is a collection of pages automatically formed by MediaWiki by analyzing category tags in articles. Category tags are in the form Category:Extensions. The part after the ":" is the name of the Category. Adding a category tag causes a link to the category and any super-categories to go to the bottom of the page. As stated, it also results in the page being added to the category listing.

Comment out

To hide from normal display whilst retaining the material for editors to see. This is done by inserting the characters at the end. These character strings are used to delimit comments in HTML code.

Contributor

Users submitting content to a wiki.

Double redirect

A redirect which leads to another redirect. Counterintuitively, this will not bring one to the final destination, so it needs to be eliminated by linking directly to the target redirect. Double redirects are generated when moving a page that has redirects leading to it. See also Repoint.

Extensions

Extensions let you customize how MediaWiki looks and works. Only someone with administration access to the filesystem on a server can install extensions for MediaWiki, but anyone can check which extensions are active on an instance of MediaWiki by accessing the Special:Version article. See also: Manual:Extensions

Gadget

A gadget is a JavaScript tool that can be enabled from user preferences.

History

All previous versions of an article, from its creation to its current state. Also called page history.

Interwiki

A link to a sister project; this can be an interlanguage link to a corresponding article in a different language, or a link to a project such as Wikibooks, Meta, etc. The abbreviations iw or i/w are often used in edit summaries when an interwiki link has been added or changed.

Magic word, magicword, magic-word

A symbol recognized by the MediaWiki software and which when seen in the non-commented text of the page, triggers the software to do something other than display that symbol, or transclude a page with that name, but instead to use the symbol directly.

Main Page

The page to which every user not specifying an article is redirected. Due to its high exposure, all content on the Main Page is automatically protected.

Mainspace

The main article namespace (i.e. not a talk page, not a "Project:" page, not a "User:" page, etc.)

Minor edit

A minor edit is one that the contributor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. An edit of this kind is marked in its page's revision history with a lower case, bolded "m" character (m).

Move

Changing the name and location of an article because of a misspelling, violation of naming convention, misnomer, or inaccuracy. Involves either renaming the page or moving it and constructing a redirect to keep the original link intact. See also Help:Moving a page.

Namespace

A way to classify pages. See also Help:Namespaces.

Page

Any individual topic within a wiki; the web page without the top, bottom and sidebars. Pages include articles, stubs, redirects, disambiguation pages, user pages, talk pages, files, documentation and special pages.

Parameter

A template can appear differently at different pages, if a parameter is assigned a unique value in each template call. The parameter value may be a text that is substituted into the template, or a value that may control which action the template performs, much like an argument in a computer program function call. A parameter may be named or numbered. See Templates#Parameters.

Project namespace

The project namespace is a namespace dedicated to providing information about the wiki. Pages in the project namespace can always be accessed with the prefix "Project:".

Protected page

This term indicates a page that cannot be edited except by administrators, or in some cases, established users. Usually this is done to cool down an edit war.

Recent changes

A dynamically generated page (found at Special:Recentchanges) that lists all edits in descending chronological order. Sometimes abbreviated as RC.

Redirect, redir

A page title which, when requested, merely sends the reader to another page. This is used for synonyms and ease of linking.

Red link, redlink

A wikilink to a page that does not exist shows up red (example). See also blue link.

Repoint, re-point

To change the destination article of a redirect, either to avoid a double redirect or to change the redirect so that it leads to a more appropriate article. The term retarget is also frequently used.

Revert

An edit that reverses edits made by someone else, thus restoring the prior version. See also Help:Reverting

Rollback

To change a page back to the version before the last edit. Administrators and rollbackers have special tools to do this more easily.

Rollbacker

A class of users who can use the rollback feature. This feature is automatically enabled for all administrators.

Section editing

Using one of the '[edit]' links to the right of each section's title, one can get an edit window containing only the section of the page that's below the [edit] link. This makes it easier to find the exact spot where one wants to edit, and helps you avoid an edit conflict. You can turn section editing off in your preferences under the "Enable section editing via [edit] links" option.

Skin

The appearance theme in Special:Preferences. Currently, these are available: Cologne Blue, Monobook, Modern and Vector.

Soft redirect

A very short article or page that essentially points the reader in the direction of another page. Used in cases where a normal redirect is inappropriate for various reasons (e.g., it is a cross-wiki redirect).

Subpage, sub-page

A page connected to a parent page, such as Somepage/Arguments. You can only create subpages in certain namespaces. Do not use subpages in the main article space.

Subst, subst'ing

Short for "substituting" a template, which permanently copies its contents and breaks the link with the source template page. Contrast transclusion, a live updated reference to the source template page.

System administrator, SysAdmin, sysadmin

A web developer responsible for installation and maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server of a third-party wiki installation. Generally also acts as an administrator on the wiki. See also Administrator.

Talk page

A page reserved for discussion of the page with which it is associated, such as the article page. Very confusingly, the link to a talk page is labelled "discussion". All pages within Wikipedia (except pages in the Special namespace, and talk pages themselves!) have talk pages attached to them.

Template

A way of automatically including the contents of one page within another page, used for boilerplate text, navigational aids, etc.

TOC, ToC

An article (or other page)'s table of contents, which lists the subsection headings within the page. This is usually close to the top left of the page, but may be placed at the top right, floated, or omitted entirely.

Transclusion

Transclusion is the inclusion of the content of a document into another document by reference. It is typically the use of the template functionality of MediaWiki to include the same content in multiple documents without having to edit those documents separately.

User page

A personal page for wiki users. Most people use their pages to introduce themselves and to keep various personal notes and lists. They are also used by user to communicate with each other via the user talk pages. The process of Registration does not generate user pages automatically. A user page is linked to as SomeUserNameHere and appears as SomeUserNameHere.

Watchlist

A set of pages selected by the user, who can then click on My watchlist to see recent changes to those pages. See also: Help:Watchlist.

Wiki markup, wikitext, wiki text, wiki-text, etc.

Code like HTML, but simplified and more convenient, for example boldfaced text instead of boldfaced text. It is the source code stored in the database and shown in the edit box. Searching by MediaWiki is done in the wikitext, as opposed to searching by external major search engines, which is done in the resulting HTML. The size of a page is the size of the wikitext.

Wikimedia

Properly Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF), a non-profit organization that provides a legal, financial, and organizational framework for Wikipedia and its sister projects and provides the necessary hardware. Contrast MediaWiki.

Common programming syntax for web pages