Forum:Changes to interface messages

Hi! The Wikia team has recently done a review of the MediaWiki messages that make up the wiki interface, and we are making a few changes to improve the editing experience for everyone.

We found several messages that were obsolete because of upgrades in the MediaWiki software and the extensions Wikia has added to it, and in a few places, we also found messages that were unnecessarily cluttered. We have removed or simplified these messages sitewide to make Wikia sites easier to use. In addition to the MediaWiki message changes, we also adjusted the style of search results pages to make them easier to read.

Wikia communities can use their local MediaWiki messages to override the sitewide interface messages if they choose. If you would like to restore the previous messages, you can view the detailed list of changes, and an admin can copy the old text into the corresponding MediaWiki page on your local wiki. — Catherine (talk) 19:52, 3 February 2009 (UTC)


 * If i understand this correctly, if fr.guildwars got something in Newarticletext, nothing will seem changed at all when clicking red links on this wiki but fr.3d dont already have this mediawiki page so the text above the edit window will disapear when this goes live. — TulipVorlax 02:13, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Is the Messaging wiki being used to initiate these changes, or are you actually modifying MediaWiki software? If it's the later rather than the former, would we expect bugs? --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 02:18, 4 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Messaging is being used. 15:03, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Did you accidentally delete MediaWiki:Category header too? noticed the header was replaced by an empty div... (no "Pages in category "$1".") -- Sixorish 17:28, 4 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I've reverted that one, since it makes multiple section categories confusing. 18:50, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I've lost the "Show new changes starting from (last reload)" box - and restoring RCnote dosn't get it back RT  07:34, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok, it's mediawiki:rclistfrom - just needed to restore. RT  07:54, 5 February 2009 (UTC)


 * speaking of which, is it intended for the div of that to float outside of the parent? -- Sixorish 10:01, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Special:Search problem
On the Wikia help forum, I recently posted this:

Special:Search no longer allows the option of creating a page when using it. Before, there used to be a red-link that stated:

You searched for "insert search name here"(all pages starting with "insert search name here" |all pages that link to "insert search name here") This allowed you to create the page from the red-link. Is there a way to bring it back? Also, on a somewhat related note, I noticed in the MediaWiki release notes that a new optional search feature was introduced that "added optional alternative Search form look - Go button & Advanced search link instead of Go button & Search button" How can we implement this, because it doesn't seem to be the default. Thanks! -- Meghunter99 Talk to me! 14:12, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

I was then redirected here, because as it is now, it is very weird and cumbersome, and I can't create pages as easily as i once did. It's a major setback for me, and I was wondering how I can get that specific search text back. I looked at detailed list of changes, but it doesn't seem to be listed there. Any help is appreciated. -- Meghunter99 Talk to me! 17:41, 27 August 2009 (UTC)


 * It's at MediaWiki:Noexactmatch... You can edit that on your wiki to say whatever you'd like. The original text was: There is no page titled "$1". You can create this page. I hope that helps! -- Danny (talk ) 18:10, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
 * i edited the MediaWiki as such, but it still doesn't allow me to create it from a red-link through searching. Example here. I cleared my cache, but it still isn't appearing. Also, I just noticed that the red-link only appears when doing a full-text search, but not the normal search. Is there a way to make the message appear for the normal search too, and not just the full-text search? -- Meghunter99 Talk to me! 18:21, 27 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I just looked at your wiki, and I don't see the links on the sidebar to New page or Add image. Is there a reason why those aren't appearing there? It makes more sense for contributors to create new pages by clicking the "New page" link, rather than trying to search and then clicking a redlink from there. -- Danny (talk ) 18:25, 27 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I edited the Mediawiki software to hide those buttons, as they seem to invite spam links and IMO don't match up with the rest of the toolbar. Also, it would make sense if someone, IMO, were searching for an article first to find it, and then create it from the red-link, instead of automatically clicking the create article link. Also, I find the search button to be more useful in finding pages with similar names, instead of just creating five articles with the same content but different article names. So, the red-links and search bars serve a useful purpose to me, and the create-page link in the sidebar, not so much. -- Meghunter99 Talk to me! 18:33, 27 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Since Dany ask about the hiding of the create page link, let me reply to him about it.
 * I find the link and the CreatePage to be usefull on wikis like fr.3d or fractal but not on wiki like fr.guildwars or roseonline because on thoses wikis, 90% pages should use proper templates for their type.
 * On fr.guildwars, we often have to delete page that could be good contribution because we are only 3 admins and it's not our job to... oh, yeah, we're admins, maybe it is. But if we dont delete we replace content with the proper template call hoping people will eventually learn to use our own "Create a page" page (wich contain inputbox that load the template for each type of page.
 * I really support Meghunter99 when he say that having multiple articles about the same thing but with differents name is somewhat silly.


 * Now, about your problem, Meghunter99.
 * If you go to the special:search page of any wiki, there's still a text at the top of the page.
 * The problem people were talking about up on this page is that some Mediawiki pages content is not showing anymore or some of them have been emptied.
 * What i would do, i going to special:all messages (not sure of exact name) and search on that page (CTRL+F) the bit of text that still appear on the search page. When you find it, i think all is left is adding the bit of code Dany gave you up there.
 * Sure, it's not really the proper mediawiki wiki page for it, but it will work (i think). Except maybe if the "1$" part if not parsed or has a different value. Sorry if this is the case.
 * Another way to add a thing in the UI of the wiki is using javascript. But i'm not sure if there a variable that is defined with the searched string.
 * I'll look into this... — TulipVorlax 21:49, 27 August 2009 (UTC)


 * It seems that when the UI language is english, no text appear at all.
 * But on french UI, there is text above and under the search box of special:search. — TulipVorlax 22:01, 27 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I think I found the MediaWiki message, MediaWiki:Searchsubtitle, but it still doesn't work even after I created the page with the proper parameters and cleared my cache. -- Meghunter99 Talk to me! 01:51, 28 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I used both that one and the one given by Dany on fr.guildwars and i can confirm that it doesn't change anything.
 * By the way, i think my mind was mixing up a few differents things in the second part of my previous comment. — TulipVorlax 02:49, 28 August 2009 (UTC)


 * So, still no solution to this problem? -- Meghunter99 Talk to me! 16:26, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
 * It has been said on another thread that clicking a second time the search button make the link appear. But, not a solution, no. — TulipVorlax 22:37, 28 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Hmm, I'm looking at Special:Allmessages, and MediaWiki:Searchsubtitle is the one that you're looking for. When did the message go away? It's possible that this is something that changed in the recent MediaWiki 1.15 upgrade. It sounds like they've made some changes to the search interface for Monobook. MediaWiki upgrades usually involve some minor interface changes.


 * It sounds like the problem that you're trying to solve isn't how to help people create pages, but how to stop people from creating pages that you don't want them to create. You'd like to introduce another step in the create process which guides people to search and make sure that the page doesn't already exist under a different name. If it doesn't, then you want them to use the appropriate templates.


 * In general, I think that Wikia's approach is to make changes to the interface that encourage people to create more content, and give tools to the communities to help them manage that content. So the "New page" link helps contributors create pages that they think are worthwhile, and then it's up to the community to educate new contributors about the way to do that properly. There are a lot of ways to do that -- I think the most effective one is to leave people talk page messages with constructive feedback on their contributions.


 * Another way to encourage people to create appropriate pages is to redirect common misspellings or incorrectly-formatted titles to the correct version. For example, if your wiki's format is to have pages titled "John Smith, PhD" instead of "Dr. John Smith", then it's probably a good idea to go through all your doctor pages and create redirects. That way, if someone tries to create the page "Dr. Mary Jones", then there'll already be a redirect to "Mary Jones, PhD", and they won't create the duplicate page. That's a little bit of extra forethought and work, but overall it's probably a better experience for everyone than waiting for someone to create "Dr. Mary Jones", and then deleting it and being irritated at them.


 * I looked at the stats for Fossil and Fr.guildwars, and it seems like your communities are active enough to handle the current influx of newbies. This month, Fossil had eight total contributors, and I'm guessing that maybe only a couple of them were brand new. Meghunter, you're amazingly active on the wiki -- good job, by the way! -- so it seems pretty reasonable to expect that you could check in with the noobs when they come by, and help them understand the correct formatting.


 * So -- does that help? Or am I not understanding the problem? -- Danny (talk ) 20:27, 30 August 2009 (UTC)


 * French wikis (perticularly on Wikia) have a problem that most users comes by and dont stay because they dont want to learn things they dont care about to edit. They perticularly dont care about copyrights, licenses and fair use. And they dont want to learn coding. From my experience, people that know english are more inclined to accept the need to learn coding.
 * But on top of that, fr.guildwars has another problem that is simply that Guild Wars 2 is comming soon and most pages on the wiki contain only a fraction of the infos it should contain. It's really uneasy to complete thoses when we can't copy it from other french websites (wich arent wikis) and too few people are able to translate the official wiki.
 * It's hard to give positives comments on what they do their contributions contain tons of errors, and me or another of the 2 admins would have to redo it from scratch. Trying to reuse their content is most of the time more tedious that replacing it with the good template call and filling some of the blanks.
 * I've tried to make so the wiki show some help in the editintro with links that load templates, but it was hard to setup and i didn't get positives comments. — TulipVorlax 01:02, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Another approach that I have tried is to adjust the text that appears when people try to create a new page. I have been meaning to improve this for a long time (make it much more prominent, and possibly simplify the text in our "guidelines"). The text is set at w:c:vim:MediaWiki:Newarticletext, and here is how it looks: w:c:vim:Special:CreatePage. JohnBeckett 01:41, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * If contributors don't want to learn how to use the templates, then that might be a sign that your templates and procedures are too complicated. Brand new contributors shouldn't have to worry about things like copyrights and templates; they just want to add some content. That's not a problem -- it's a wonderful thing. People are coming to your wiki, they like what they see, and they want to help. Hooray!


 * So I have a few ideas for how to make that work for everyone's benefit.


 * #1. Try to simplify your system. Use fewer templates and tables, and more text and images. Use image placeholders to show people where to put images. Add placeholder text so that people know what kind of text they should add.


 * #2. If everyone who comes to your wiki is doing it "wrong"... then consider the possibility that you might have it backwards. Maybe they know something you don't!


 * #3. Remember: People are more important than rules! You can have tons of policies and procedures, but if nobody is willing to stick around and help, then you'll never get anything done.


 * If those suggestions don't make sense to you, then I think it's worth thinking about whether you really want a wiki at all. Wikis are supposed to invite people in, encouraging everyone to add their knowledge and ideas. The disadvantage is that things can get messy, and you have to compromise a lot; the advantage is that the thing that you build is way better than what you could have done alone.


 * It sounds like you've got a pretty rigid system that only you and the other two admins can understand. If you're not really interested in helping other people contribute -- either by giving them constructive feedback or making the system easier -- then maybe a wiki isn't right for you. Maybe you really just want a regular website, that the three of you can work on alone. What do you think? -- Danny (talk ) 02:04, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The message went away around the same time as the MediaWiki update. However, even if they changed some of the interfaces for Monobook, would that still affect Monaco skins?


 * Well, creating redirects for fossils is a particularly tricky matter, as besides the regular article on Tyrannosaurus, there are also the individual fossil specimens to worry about. Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as having "John Smith, PhD" redirect to "Dr. John Smith". For example, there are over 40 known specimens of Tyrannosaurus and thousands of individual bones, and it isn't worth having an article only on CM 9380/13, which is only a Tyrannosaurus toe bone. That means that there would have to be thousands of redirects only to Tyrannosaurus. Of course, no one is probably gonna search for a specific bone, so the point is probably moot and it isn't pressing at all. However, if someone were to search for it, they would find page text matches that would link to the article Tyrannosaurus. Anyway...., I guess a nice feature would be a forced search for anyone who clicks on "create an article" button, allowing them to see if the article they want to create is already made. Of course, this has its problems like what is people find it annoying or something and just want to create it right-away.


 * Regarding JohnBeckett's suggestions, I have also edited the New article text to be more inviteful for users to contribute to. I am most certainly happy to welcome newcomers to the wiki. The problem, of course, is retaining them. :P -- Meghunter99 Talk to me! 02:51, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict)
 * Maybe i can explain better using comparisons and since we cover the same topic as GuildWiki, i'll compare our things to theirs :


 * I dont see how our simple fill the blank infoboxes can be that hard to understand. And i really dont think it is.
 * Among the thing that people do wrong, they often create page on a character or an object, putting in just a few line of ordinairy plain text that say something like "to find that guy go north in and around do his quest and you'll get big reward ". That is just an exemple.
 * That's why i said many times on this forum that i wonder how the french wikipedia got to the size it is. Yes, i know, it's like comparing apples and peaches.
 * Sometimes i even consider (some kind of phantasm) putting a big bolden line right in the middle of the main page with a link to our page where they just have to put the name of something in the right box to create the page about it with the proper template, and then fill the blanks.
 * This is giving me an idea...
 * Oh ! And was forgetting something... We never managed to make us some publicity in related communities because people tell us to stop wasting our time. I could try but registering on any forum just to post a link to some site is never wellcomed. Also, after GuildWiki move to Wikia, i asked them a few time to make so interlanguages links could be as easilly included on their page that it is on ours, but their community splitted at the time and they dont have a lot of interest into sending people to other wikis. I could try to see if they could change their mind a bit. But i think they think it's up the the poor 3 guys of fr.guildwars to putt all links on their page. Will they let us do ? Can't this be done by some bot ? — TulipVorlax 03:02, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Meghunter -- Okay, that makes sense. Monaco is built on top of the MediaWiki (Monobook) interface. So it's possible that MediaWiki decided to remove a message in one place, because they put something else in another place -- but we don't have that other place in Monaco, so it just goes away. So when we do an upgrade, we have to check all the changes, and if there are things that don't work for us, then it's up to us to fix them. In this case, MediaWiki took away a message that we had already taken away as a default, so we didn't do any work to replace it.


 * TulipVorlax -- I think your examples show what I was talking about. Modèle:Compétence has almost 40 fields in it; that's a very complicated template.


 * There are simple tasks on a wiki, and expert tasks. Writing "To find this guy, go north in blah, and you'll get this reward" is a simple task; that's what new people do. Filling out a 40-field template is an expert task; that's what admins do.


 * If you try to make new people do the expert tasks, they won't -- they'll just get frustrated, and go away. That's why you only have three people on fr.guildwars. Your wiki is too hard to contribute to. -- Danny (<font color="Blue" size="1">talk ) 03:33, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * It has been done that way because it's easier to update thing after each time Anet make an update for the game. Otherwise we wouldn't have been able to get to 10 000 pages.
 * Why not bring that talking on the wiki where the others admins could talk about it too ? If you're willing to continue talking about it. Else, we can stop now. — TulipVorlax 03:46, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Sure, it's up to you. Unfortunately, I can't speak French, but if the other people there know English, then I'm happy to continue. Just let me know what page to go to... -- <font color="Blue">Danny (<font color="Blue" size="1">talk ) 03:49, 31 August 2009 (UTC)