Wikipedia:MediaWiki namespace

The MediaWiki namespace is a mechanism allowing non-developers to customise or translate the MediaWiki web interface. Each message in the $wgAllMessagesEn array in Language.php now corresponds to a page in the MediaWiki namespace. For example, the "from Wikipedia" message which is displayed at the top of each page and reads "MediaWiki:Fromwikipedia", is configurable at Template:Fromwikipedia.

Because the changes to these pages has a global effect, only Wikipedia: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.

For instructions on using this namespace, and for more information about it, please see meta:MediaWiki namespace.

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.

History

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". All non-system messages were moved to new namespace, and many redirects still exist. The initialisation script also replaced MediaWiki: references in articles with Template: in order to bypass the redirects.

In order to see a list of some messages which were part of the MediaWiki namespace, refer to the following pages:

Wikipedia:Topics – topical navigational boxes. These have been largely replaced with categories, lists, and series boxes.
Wikipedia:All pages in the MediaWiki namespace
Wikipedia:Unprotected MediaWiki messages – a deprecated list showing which of the interface messages were previously unprotected

For a short time, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion used MediaWiki: messages named in the format "MediaWiki:VfD-articlename". These were moved to the Template: space in June 2004 and are now named "Template:VfD-articlename".

List of system messages

History

See also