Help talk:System messages/whitelist

Should this need article protection?
As a high-risk subject, vandalism would be more damaging than in a normal case of any other help article - so I think this should be protected from anonymous edits. But I can see why it has been left unprotected as its got near-to-none attention from vandals.


 * We try and avoid protecting pages as much as possible, on the principle that the vast majority of editors want to help improve them. Even if this page were vandalised, the effect would likely only be confusing rather than dangerous. 10:19, January 4, 2016 (UTC)

This is just plain stupid
Come on, why can't we just freely edit all these system messages? If administrators on Wikipedia and ED can do so, why not us??? Stop limiting all useful administrator tools to yourself, FANDOM staff. Let us actually customize the wiki like a proper MediaWiki admin! 121.74.217.62 20:15, September 1, 2018 (UTC)
 * The system messages are whitelisted for security reasons. If you want to modify these messages, you can contact Staff with the content you want added and they should be able to add it for you. no replyz 01:51, September 2, 2018 (UTC)
 * Maybe it's because you don't want us to edit them so they say "FANDOM staff suck", because arrogant FANDOM staff never admit they do! 27.252.55.248 04:03, September 4, 2018 (UTC)

Pagetitle
According to Mediawiki this message should provide the HTML  code on each page. The default message is:, which means.

The MediaWiki:Pagetitle-view-mainpage, that is mentioned on the white-list, should be used to provide the "title" for the main page. Here on CC it says "Wikia Community Central", clearly showing that it's outdated.

But these two messages are disabled sitewide. Admins can edit them, but they're not taken into account when generating the "title" element on pages. The actual working behavior is: They work on Gamepedia. So hopefully this will work on the unified platform.—Sapador Castelo 20:46, July 19, 2020 (UTC) | Edited 21:27, July 19, 2020 (UTC)
 * on the wiki main page:
 * on other pages of the wiki:

Pls whitelist the language specific subpages of things whitelisted
Hi, I am an admin and I spent a lot of time on a problem related to Newarticletext today. See my post for details.

So the thing is, some MediaWiki pages (Newarticletext in my case) only work for users of the language of that wiki (user's UI language can be changed in Special:preferences), while others work for all users (e.g. common.css), in the case that no language subpages (e.g. mediawiki:Newarticletext/en) are edited. However, as an admin, I can only edit the "main" page but not any language subpages. I can not see any security issues which apply differently for users using different languages.

Besides, in terms of the design, I think it is problematic that the welcome text simply corresponds to the user's language setting. Imagining that I set my language to Chinese and I'm browsing a wiki written in English. I then found a red link and open the editor, trying to contribute something in English. However, as my UI language is Chinese, I won't get any field-specific editing help from the English welcome text (if there is any) set by the admins of that community. DDElephant (talk) 04:50, 14 May 2021 (UTC)