Wikipedia:MediaWiki namespace

[[:|WP:MWN]]

The MediaWiki namespace allows the making of edits to customise or translate the MediaWiki web interface. For details see Help:MediaWiki namespace.

Because the changes to these pages have a global effect, only administrators have the ability to edit them. Non-admins who would like to suggest a change can do so at the Wikipedia:Village pump, this page's discussion page, or the talk page of the associated MediaWiki: message. And even if there is concession for a change, these should only be done at Special:Allmessages if they are only helpful for Wikipedia. General changes that could benefit other wiki sites can be submitted to BetaWiki.

List of system messages

All of the special system messages are viewable from Special:Allmessages. Each listing provides a link to the message and its talk page. The listing also displays the default and current versions of the interface messages.

Caution: Some messages must have HTML links, and others must have wikilinks. To find out which is which, you must know where the message is used in the interface.

History

The MediaWiki namespace was introduced on December 6, 2003. Before this time, user interface text was part of the PHP software and could only be changed by software developers. Since the introduction they have been editable by normal users.

Until June 2004, the MediaWiki namespace was also used for creating other boilerplate text messages, to be used in articles. This function was replaced with the Template namespace as a function of the "Template namespace initialisation script", a bot run by developer Tim Starling. All non-system messages were moved to new namespace, and many redirects still exist. The initialization script also replaced MediaWiki: references in articles with Template: in order to bypass the redirects. In October to November 2005, the excess redirects were deleted. This background explains why the concept now known as "templates" is sometimes referred to as "messages".

For a short time, before the renaming from votes for deletion (VfD) to articles for deletion (AfD), deletion debates used MediaWiki: messages named in the format "MediaWiki:VfD-articlename". These were moved to the Template: space in June 2004 and are now (as of January 2006) subpages of wikipedia:Articles for deletion or wikipedia:Votes for deletion.