text:
Help talk:Related changes

Meta:Help:Related changes authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Related changes =
 * 08:12, 27 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed capitalization of template name.)
 * 03:37, 25 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed capitalization of template name.)
 * 09:03, 29 June 2005 User:Patrick m
 * 09:01, 29 June 2005 User:Patrick (update)
 * 08:59, 29 June 2005 User:Patrick (It behaves like a watchlist which would contain every page linked to from the current page, but with the important difference that all changes are listed, not just the last one.)
 * 08:56, 29 June 2005 User:Patrick (new: all recent changes (before MediaWiki 1.5: only the last))
 * 14:26, 25 May 2005 User:Patrick m (→Options)
 * 12:29, 21 April 2005 User:AnyFile
 * 15:23, 18 April 2005 User:Patrick m
 * 08:38, 10 April 2005 User:Patrick (except that Related Changes does not automatically include talk pages; to watch also the corresponding talk pages, links to them also have to be in the page on which Related Changes is applied.)
 * 07:48, 10 April 2005 User:Silsor (This feature can be used to set up custom-watchlist-like functionality. It behaves exactly like a watchlist which would contain every page linked to from the current page.)
 * 20:25, 21 March 2005 User:Aphaia m (Reverted edits by 66.204.20.254 to last version by Patrick)
 * 19:10, 21 March 2005 User:66.204.20.254 (→Options)
 * 01:03, 16 February 2005 User:Patrick (*Applying "What links here" and "Related Changes" to a category)
 * 00:59, 16 February 2005 User:Patrick (See also hide minor edits.)
 * 16:52, 18 January 2005 User:YebisYa m ("langs" parameter in the the hc template)
 * 06:45, 29 October 2004 User:Jean-Christophe Chazalette m (Reverted edits by 221.194.206.191 to last version by 66.54.155.162)
 * 05:33, 29 October 2004 User:221.194.206.191
 * 20:29, 24 September 2004 User:66.54.155.162 (→Caviets)
 * 06:00, 23 September 2004 User:AaronPeterson m (added headers, moved a see also to it's related section, added )
 * 13:00, 12 August 2004 User:Patrick (In this regard a direct link to the target article is superior.)
 * 12:58, 12 August 2004 User:Patrick (When applying the feature to a subpage, the automatic link to the parent page is ignored, i.e., changes in the parent page are not listed unless there is also an explicit)
 * 14:43, 16 June 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 14:41, 16 June 2004 User:Patrick (copy bits from Wikipedia:Related Changes)
 * 21:03, 25 May 2004 User:193.29.77.111
 * 01:05, 15 April 2004 User:Jroes m (Added a link to the next page in the guide)
 * 01:38, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer (<-MediaWiki User's Guide )
 * 01:38, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer

title: Help talk:Related changes


text:
Help talk:Renaming (moving) a page

Meta:Help:Renaming (moving) a page authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Renaming (moving) a page =
 * User:Eloquence (Help:Renaming (moving) a page moved to Help:Moving a page)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Help talk:Renaming (moving) a page


text:
Help talk:Reverting a page to an earlier version

Meta:Help:Reverting a page to an earlier version authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Reverting a page to an earlier version =
 * 20:23, 18 March 2005 User:Eloquence m
 * 20:21, 18 March 2005 User:Eloquence (Help:Reverting a page to an earlier version moved to Help:Reverting)


text:
Help:Reverting

To revert to an earlier version:
 * Go to the page, click on "History" tab at the top of the page, and click on the time and date of the earlier version you want to revert to. It will not work if you click on 'cur', 'last', or "Compare selected versions".
 * Then when that page comes up, you'll see something like "(Revision as of 23:19 Jul 15, 2003)" below the title, rather than "From {project name}".
 * Verify that you've selected the correct version, and click to edit the page, as you would normally.
 * You'll get a warning, above the edit box, about editing an out-of-date revision.
 * Ignore the warning and save the page. Be sure to add the word "revert" (or "rv") to the edit summary

Reverts and edit conflicts
Reverts never cause an edit conflict - if between you pressing edit, and then pressing post, someone else edits the page, their edits will be silently overwritten (though still in the page history). Beware of reverting high-traffic pages! Conversely, if it looks like someone has deleted your edits, consider if it's more likely that it's one of these unfortunate reversion conflicts.

Admin-only "rollback" link
On a user contributions page an admin has additional "rollback" links at lines which are also marked "top", i.e. the lines regarding edits of articles which are the last edit made by anybody to that article. Also the diff page showing the difference between an old and the current version of a page has this link. Clicking on the link reverts to the last edit not authored by the user concerned, with automatic edit summary "Reverted edits by X to last version by Y".

If, between loading the User Contributions page and pressing "rollback" someone else has edited or rolled back the page already, one gets the message "Rollback failed" with explanation.

If the user concerned has created the page and been the only editor, even though a rollback link appears, clicking it gives the message "Cannot revert edit; last contributor is only author of this article." Reverting the creation of the page is done with the separate delete link.

This feature can not be used when the last two edits were by the same user, and one wants to revert the last one only.

The feature is especially useful in the case of a known vandal, whose edits one need not check anymore before reverting them.

title: Help:Reverting


text:
Help talk:Reverting

Meta:Help:Reverting authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Reverting =
 * 06:02, 16 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed hyperlinks that break when this page is copied to other projects.)
 * 20:57, 3 October 2005 User:69.206.224.97 (typo)
 * 20:56, 3 October 2005 User:69.206.224.97 (history no longer in side bar)
 * 20:53, 3 October 2005 User:69.206.224.97 (s/Page History/History/)
 * 18:12, 7 September 2005 User:Korrigan m (rv to last version by Patrick (quite enjoying reverting on this page :-))
 * 21:07, 6 September 2005 User:130.167.102.96
 * 14:30, 20 June 2005 User:Patrick m (→Admin-only "rollback" link)
 * 14:28, 20 June 2005 User:Patrick (→Admin-only "rollback" link - Also the diff page showing the difference between al old and the current version has this link.)
 * 13:59, 20 June 2005 User:Patrick m (→Admin-only "rollback" link)
 * 23:11, 21 April 2005 User:TheDJ (add h:h and h:f)
 * 12:25, 7 April 2005 User:Patrick m (→Admin-only "rollback" link)
 * 12:24, 7 April 2005 User:Patrick (→Admin-only "rollback" link - misc)
 * 13:16, 10 March 2005 User:Patrick (It will not work if you click on 'cur', 'last', or "Compare selected versions".)
 * 04:46, 18 November 2004 User:Eloquence
 * 04:45, 18 November 2004 User:Eloquence m
 * 07:25, 7 September 2004 User:195.1.15.178 (Added a missing quotation mark in the top section ("Page history))
 * 10:02, 12 July 2004 User:Patrick (starting to remove "Next page")
 * 21:01, 25 May 2004 User:193.29.77.111
 * 00:44, 15 April 2004 User:Jroes m (Added a link to the next page in the guide)
 * 15:45, 13 February 2004 User:Benedetto m (insert "admin")
 * 20:28, 13 November 2003 User:Daniel Mayer (more from Wikipedia version)
 * 20:22, 13 November 2003 User:Daniel Mayer m
 * 00:38, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer m
 * 00:37, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer (converted)
 * 00:27, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer (en.wikipedia version)

Out of date copy
This is a copy of m:Help:Reverting from 27 November 2005, now extremely out-of-date. I was going to update this myself, but found the meta copy hopelessly en:Wikipedia-specific, with some references that didn't even work for WP, either. I've posted a request at m:Help talk:Reverting for a proper parameterization and link check on the article, but if someone gets ambitious, they might copy and convert it from its current state. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:37, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

title: Help talk:Reverting


text:
Help:Romanian characters

''This article is less complete in its discussion of ISO character sets than the corresponding Help:Turkish characters. If anyone has sufficient knowledge, it would be great to bring it up to that standard.''

The Romanian alphabet contains six letters not present in ISO-8859-1 and that will therefore present problems for use on old mediawiki wikis (all MediaWiki version 1.5 wikis including all wikimedia wikis are UTF-8). nor are four of them found in most readily available fonts, including those commonly used in Romania, : upper- and lowercase "A" with breve, upper- and lowercase "S" with comma, and upper- and lowercase "T" with comma. These last used to be unified with and are still often substituted by the (slightly) more tractable upper- and lowercase "S" with cedilla and upper- and lowercase "T" with cedilla.

When authoring HTML or wikitext that uses the more unusual Romanian characters, the following information may be useful:

The following string may be useful to keep open in an editing Window to cut and paste when working on Romanian-language content:

 * Ă Â Î Ş Ţ ă â î ş ţ

There is extensive relevant discussion at ro:Discuţie Wikipedia:Limba română conţine diacritice; the discussion is in a mixture of English and Romanian.

See also Help:Special characters

title: Help:Romanian characters


text:
Help talk:Romanian characters

Meta:Help:Romanian characters authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Romanian characters =
 * 18:34, 17 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed hyperlinks that break when this page is copied to other projects.)
 * 00:36, 20 August 2005 User:Plugwash (update text to current mediawiki situation i don't know anything more about romanian though.)
 * 07:56, 30 June 2005 User:Joy m (fixed entities)
 * 23:29, 21 April 2005 User:TheDJ (add h:h and h:f)
 * 21:02, 25 May 2004 User:193.29.77.111
 * 00:52, 15 April 2004 User:Jroes m (Added a link to the next page in the guide)
 * 09:44, 18 December 2003 User:Jmabel (Bringing in useful material from en:Romanian Language)

title: Help talk:Romanian characters


text:
Help:Searching

Search namespace (replace x in the URL by the search term):

all 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

The result count in the header of the search result is the total for all namespaces; accordingly there are links to supposed other pages with results; correctly a lower number of results is actually presented. (2895)

Search facilities in MediaWiki
This page explains the search button for the search box which appears on every page, and the "Search result settings" section in the preferences.

list of all pages

 * Special:Allpages - Alphabetic index for the main namespace

Please note that a-z come after A-Z.

For some other namespaces, see Help:Namespace.

Go button
See also Help:Go button.

Search field
Pressing the [Enter] key while the search field is active is equivalent to clicking on the [Go] button. While this is obvious when using Internet Explorer (tested on version 6), Mozilla (version 1.6 at least) provides no such indication.

Avoid short and common words
This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.

See Help:Common words, searching for which is not possible for the stop words filtered out by the database. From there one can at least go to a page with a stop word as title. Searching for the combination of one or more words and the common word "not" give a database query syntax error due to a bug in the software.

See Help:Short words in searches for a procedure to allow MySQL to index words shorter than four letters.

Search is case-insensitive
The searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.

Words with special characters
In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Sint Odiliënberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "&euml;". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odiliënberg); in the second case it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg. This is actually a bug that should be fixed -- the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent. See also Help:Special characters.

Phrase
There is no method for searching for a phrase. Contrary to what you might expect, enclosing phrases in double quotation marks such as "can of tuna" will retrieve all pages containing "of" "tuna" and "can".

No regular expressions or wildcards
You cannot use regular expressions or wildcards such as ? or *. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it. To search for pages with the words "boat" or "boats" search like this: "boat or boats".

Words in single quotes
If a word appears in a page with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in pages, for which this problem does not arise.

An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.

Delay in updating the search index
For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes to pages are not always immediately taken into account in searches.

Namespaces searched
The search only applies to the namespaces selected in the preferences. To search the other namespaces check or uncheck the tickboxes in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page. Depending on the browser, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but may no longer be effective. To be sure the box is in effect, uncheck and recheck it.

Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image pages. For searching the titles, use Special:Imagelist.

The URL is

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?ns0=1&ns1=1&ns2=1&ns3=1&ns4=1&ns5=1&ns6=1&ns7=1&ns8=1&ns9=1&ns10=1&ns11=1&ns12=1&ns13=1&ns14=1&ns15=1&fulltext=Search&search=qqq

where "qqq" is used as example for the search term, and the namespaces to be searched are specified.

Thus, e.g.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?ns10=1&ns11=1&fulltext=Search&search=test

searches the Template and Template talk namespaces for "test", and

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?ns6=1&fulltext=Search&search=jpg

searches the image description pages for "jpg".

To search the Help pages use http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&ns12=1&&fulltext=Search&search=x and replace the x in the URL by the search term. Replacing it in the search box does not work the same: the search is then in the namespaces specified in the preferences, instead of just in the help namespace.

The number of search results reported seems to be the total for all namespaces; accordingly there are links to supposed other pages with results; correctly a lower number of results is actually presented.

(Also there is a special search feature Special:Imagelist, which searches in titles, regardless of whether there is an image description.)

Languages searched
See the feature request at 1837.

Redirects can be excluded
Check or uncheck the tickbox "List redirects" in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page.

The wikitext is searched
The wikitext (source text, what one sees in the edit box) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for interlanguage links, special characters (if ê is coded as &ecirc; it is found searching for ecirc), etc.

Highlighting
Some portions of matching pages that contain the searched-for terms are shown, with the terms highlighted in red. You can set the number of lines extracted and the amount of text per line shown in your preferences.

If you search e.g. for "book" you get only pages with that word, not pages with "books" only. However, on pages with "book" and "books", also the part "book" of the word "books" is highlighted.

Google
The URL
 * http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22interwiki+link%22

searches for the phrase interwiki link in wikipedia.org — that is, in all Wikipedias as well as Wikisource (sources.wikipedia.org) and meta.wikipedia.org, but not meta.wikimedia.org.

%3A is a colon, %22 a double quotation mark ("), and + is equivalent to a space ; %20 may also be used for a space. (See also Help:URL.)

Note that the underscore (_) is not equivalent to a space: putting it in the URL results in a search for a word containing actual underscores at those positions. Thus
 * http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22interwiki_link%22

finds pages containing the term interwiki_link.

Examples
Working:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22michael+jackson%22

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22michael%20jackson%22

Searching for first term only:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22michael jackson%22

Searching for two terms, not the phrase:

http://www.google.com/search?q=michael+jackson

http://www.google.com/search?q=michael%20jackson

Searching for phrase with underscore:

http://www.google.com/search?q=michael_jackson

Thumbnails in Google cache
Browse Wikipedia images with thumbnails in Google cache: png jpg gif

Each thumbnail links to an image result page, which links both to the Wikipedia image page and to the image itself on Wikimedia.

Administration Options
from includes/DefaultSettings.php, apparently you have to look up your namespace table, because they are numbered...

$wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault = array( -1 => 0, 0 => 1, 1 => 0, 2 => 0, 3 => 0, 4 => 0, 5 => 0, 6 => 0, 7 => 0, 8 => 0, 9 => 1, 10 => 0, 11 => 1 );

I would guess that -1 is the default settings.. and 0 is main namespace.. and 0 is off and 1 is on.

title: Help:Searching


text:
Help talk:Searching

Meta:Help:Searching authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Searching =
 * 08:13, 27 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed capitalization of template name.)
 * 03:35, 25 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed capitalization of template name.)
 * 20:28, 20 November 2005 User:Datrio m (Reverted edits by 63.19.208.12 to last version by Datrio)
 * 20:24, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.208.12
 * 20:23, 20 November 2005 User:Datrio m (Reverted edits by 63.19.208.12 to last version by M7)
 * 20:22, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.208.12 (what makes you think I will stop?)
 * 15:59, 20 November 2005 User:M7 m (Reverted edits by 63.19.207.129 to last version by M7)
 * 15:57, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.207.129
 * 15:41, 20 November 2005 User:M7 m (Reverted edits by 63.19.207.8 to last version by M7)
 * 15:40, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.207.8
 * 15:38, 20 November 2005 User:M7 m (Reverted edits by 63.19.149.16 to last version by M7)
 * 15:36, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.149.16
 * 15:35, 20 November 2005 User:M7 m (Reverted edits by 63.19.149.16 to last version by M7)
 * 15:34, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.149.16
 * 15:34, 20 November 2005 User:M7 m (Reverted edits by 63.19.149.16 to last version by Mindspillage)
 * 15:32, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.149.16
 * 15:28, 20 November 2005 User:Mindspillage m (Reverted edits by 63.19.149.16 to last version by Korg)
 * 15:14, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.149.16
 * 05:12, 20 November 2005 User:Korg m (Reverted edits by 63.19.214.1 to last version by 203.12.97.91)
 * 03:52, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.214.1
 * 03:51, 20 November 2005 User:203.12.97.91 (reverted vandalism)
 * 03:37, 20 November 2005 User:63.19.214.1
 * 03:49, 16 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed hyperlinks that break when this page is copied to other projects.)
 * 02:42, 1 October 2005 User:Mindspillage m (Reverted edits by 63.19.197.89 to last version by Amgine)
 * 02:41, 1 October 2005 User:63.19.197.89 (Shut up. Revert.)
 * 02:39, 1 October 2005 User:Amgine (reverting a complete nobody.)
 * 02:38, 1 October 2005 User:63.19.134.29 (You loser will never give up. Neither will I.)
 * 02:37, 1 October 2005 User:Amgine (rv vandalism)
 * 02:36, 1 October 2005 User:63.19.134.29 (Only a complete Dumbass has never heard of Mayodan)
 * 02:32, 1 October 2005 User:Mindspillage m (Reverted edits by 63.19.134.29 to last version by Mindspillage)
 * 02:30, 1 October 2005 User:63.19.134.29
 * 01:51, 1 October 2005 User:Mindspillage m (Reverted edits by 63.19.131.104 to last version by 24.85.85.76)
 * 01:50, 1 October 2005 User:63.19.131.104
 * 01:22, 1 October 2005 User:24.85.85.76 (rv vandalism)
 * 01:18, 1 October 2005 User:63.19.139.203 (Give up, jerks!)
 * 21:10, 30 September 2005 User:Korg m (Reverted edits by 63.19.139.203 to last version by Korg)
 * 21:01, 30 September 2005 User:63.19.139.203
 * 20:35, 30 September 2005 User:Korg m (Reverted edits by 63.19.213.221 to last version by Korg)
 * 20:31, 30 September 2005 User:63.19.213.221
 * 14:25, 30 September 2005 User:Korg m (Reverted edits by 63.19.192.67 to last version by Datrio)
 * 14:24, 30 September 2005 User:63.19.192.67
 * 13:44, 30 September 2005 User:Datrio m (Reverted edits by 63.19.192.67 to last version by Korg)
 * 13:44, 30 September 2005 User:63.19.192.67
 * 04:47, 30 September 2005 User:Korg m (Reverted edits by 63.19.148.2 to last version by Aphaia)
 * 04:13, 30 September 2005 User:63.19.148.2 (I am going to do this till you give up!)
 * 03:33, 30 September 2005 User:Aphaia m (Reverted edits by 63.19.148.2 to last version by Korg)
 * 03:02, 30 September 2005 User:63.19.148.2
 * 02:54, 30 September 2005 User:Korg m (Reverted edits by 63.19.148.2 to last version by Brion VIBBER)
 * 02:30, 30 September 2005 User:63.19.148.2
 * 00:56, 30 September 2005 User:Brion VIBBER (rev)
 * 14:49, 29 September 2005 User:63.19.156.83
 * 03:48, 29 September 2005 User:Mindspillage m (Reverted edits by 63.19.159.204 to last version by Angelix)
 * 03:39, 29 September 2005 User:63.19.159.204
 * 06:39, 25 September 2005 User:Angelix m (→The wikitext is searched - MediaWiki User's Guide: Interwiki linking->Help:Interwiki linking)
 * 18:03, 6 September 2005 User:161.28.125.22 (→Avoid short and common words)
 * 18:02, 6 September 2005 User:161.28.125.22 (→Avoid short and common words)
 * 18:50, 26 August 2005 User:137.165.8.64 (→Search facilities in MediaWiki)
 * 12:20, 18 July 2005 User:Patrick m
 * 12:19, 18 July 2005 User:Patrick
 * 12:12, 18 July 2005 User:Patrick (all)
 * 11:40, 18 July 2005 User:Patrick m
 * 09:53, 18 July 2005 User:Patrick (Search namespace (replace x in the URL by the search term):)
 * 12:28, 16 July 2005 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searched)
 * 12:26, 16 July 2005 User:Patrick (The number of search results reported seems to be the total for all namespaces; accordingly there are links to supposed other pages with results; correctly a lower number of results is actually presen)
 * 12:16, 16 July 2005 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searched)
 * 12:10, 16 July 2005 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searched)
 * 12:08, 16 July 2005 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searched)
 * 12:06, 16 July 2005 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searched)
 * 12:02, 16 July 2005 User:Patrick (To search the Help pages use and replace the x in the URL by the search term.)
 * 21:19, 23 June 2005 User:Adam Katz (→Avoid short and common words - how to index shorter words)
 * 21:37, 16 May 2005 User:Duesentrieb (→Boolean search possible - not any more.)
 * 15:03, 27 April 2005 User:Patrick m (→See also)
 * 21:40, 23 April 2005 User:Patrick
 * 16:26, 21 April 2005 User:TheDJ (convert to h:h and h:f)
 * 20:44, 19 April 2005 User:Patrick m (→See also)
 * 16:02, 18 April 2005 User:Patrick (mv ills)
 * 14:57, 18 April 2005 User:Patrick
 * 16:32, 17 April 2005 User:AnyFile (hi -> hh)
 * 16:19, 17 April 2005 User:AnyFile (hc -> hcen, added it link)
 * 15:07, 7 April 2005 User:67.166.125.169 (fixed awkward wording)
 * 15:04, 7 April 2005 User:67.166.125.169 (simple typo)
 * 03:46, 7 April 2005 User:Brianjd (→Languages searched - See the feature request at MediaZilla:1837.)
 * 00:35, 2 April 2005 User:209.240.205.63 (ENENKIO)
 * 02:29, 28 March 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 80.127.11.11 to last version by 194.72.54.134)
 * 17:26, 27 March 2005 User:80.127.11.11 (Made a ' ' space into a %20 in a example URL)
 * 12:54, 24 March 2005 User:194.72.54.134 (→Boolean search possible)
 * 12:54, 24 March 2005 User:194.72.54.134 (→Boolean search possible)
 * 23:56, 4 March 2005 User:64.154.93.1 (→phrase)
 * 16:47, 2 March 2005 User:64.231.29.114 (→Administration Options)
 * 14:36, 23 February 2005 User:Patrick (→Google - ====Thumbnails in Google cache====)
 * 16:35, 19 February 2005 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searched -searching image titles does not seem to work with the general search function)
 * 12:44, 28 January 2005 User:Patrick (→Google -====Examples====)
 * 15:41, 21 December 2004 User:Mormegil m (+cs:)
 * 03:34, 2 December 2004 User:Patrick (→Highlighting - restore bit in clarified form)
 * 07:32, 1 December 2004 User:Brion VIBBER (→Secondary search - remove strange invented term used nowhere else)
 * 22:36, 7 November 2004 User:Curious1 ([Enter] key = [Go] button (in Mozilla too).)
 * 06:43, 29 October 2004 User:Jean-Christophe Chazalette m (Reverted edits by 221.194.206.191 to last version by AaronPeterson)
 * 04:32, 29 October 2004 User:221.194.206.191
 * 16:08, 18 October 2004 User:AaronPeterson m (→Searching limitations)
 * 16:07, 18 October 2004 User:AaronPeterson m (→Gotchas -  are moving to Search Limitations)
 * 22:46, 16 October 2004 User:Patrick m (Reverted edit of 129.46.221.40, changed back to last version by AaronPeterson)
 * 22:39, 16 October 2004 User:129.46.221.40 (→Boolean search possible)
 * 05:18, 23 September 2004 User:AaronPeterson
 * 20:11, 5 September 2004 User:Patrick (→hide minor edits - rm off-topic)
 * 13:57, 5 September 2004 User:AaronPeterson m (→Search facilities in MediaWiki)
 * 05:45, 5 September 2004 User:AaronPeterson m (→Administration Options)
 * 05:31, 5 September 2004 User:AaronPeterson m (→See also)
 * 04:19, 5 September 2004 User:AaronPeterson m
 * 04:12, 5 September 2004 User:AaronPeterson m
 * 03:59, 5 September 2004 User:AaronPeterson (making it hierarchical)
 * 04:21, 19 August 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 04:16, 19 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Google - *Searchindex table)
 * 23:49, 9 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Secondary search - Oddly, sometimes no context is shown.)
 * 23:37, 9 August 2004 User:Patrick (After finding the pages, these pages are searched again to have the results show in red in the context lines; this search uses a more relaxed criterion: search terms occurring in the wikitext, even as)
 * 23:28, 9 August 2004 User:Patrick (To search for a phrase, enclose it in double quotation marks.)
 * 23:28, 8 August 2004 User:216.61.33.185 (→Google - wikified -- markup too "busy"?; section needs a serious rewrite)
 * 07:44, 30 July 2004 User:AaronPeterson m (Bottom )
 * 15:09, 20 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Google)
 * 15:01, 20 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Google - more)
 * 14:52, 20 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Google - as well as Wikisource (sources.wikipedia.org))
 * 14:49, 20 July 2004 User:Patrick (E.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22interwiki+link%22 searches for the phrase "interwiki link" in wikipedia.org, i.e. all Wikipedias as well as meta.wikipedia.org, but not meta)
 * 12:37, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Search facility of MediaWiki)
 * 12:32, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Namespaces searched)
 * 11:41, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick (QUESTION: - →Namespaces searched - Searching with the URL above does not work if the search term exists as a pagename in any namespace! (what to change in the URL?))
 * 10:58, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searched)
 * 10:48, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searced - Also there is a special search feature Special:Imagelist, searches in titles, regardless of whether there is an image description.)
 * 10:41, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searched by default - the titles, but only of those images which have an image description!)
 * 10:22, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Namespaces searched by default)
 * 10:05, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?ns0=1&ns1=1&ns2=1&ns3=1&ns4=1&ns5=1&ns6=1&ns7=1&ns8=1&ns9=1&ns10=1&ns11=1&ns12=1&ns13=1&ns14=1&ns15=1&search=qqq)
 * 09:54, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick (→==Namespaces searched by default== -from w:)
 * 09:40, 19 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Delay in updating the search index)
 * 07:54, 11 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Avoid short and common words)
 * 05:34, 11 July 2004 User:Achen m (→Boolean search possible)
 * 21:04, 25 May 2004 User:193.29.77.111
 * 01:53, 25 April 2004 User:Maximus Rex m (Reverted edits by The word is bird to last version by Jroes)
 * 01:48, 25 April 2004 User:The word is bird
 * 01:06, 15 April 2004 User:Jroes m (Added a link to the next page in the guide)
 * 18:22, 14 April 2004 User:68.120.19.37 (fixed minor grammer error)
 * 11:19, 24 March 2004 User:Patrick m (=The wikitext is searched=)
 * 09:25, 16 January 2004 User:Daniel Mayer
 * 17:54, 28 November 2003 User:Kowey (revert)
 * 17:31, 28 November 2003 User:137.94.11.222
 * 04:46, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer (converted)
 * 04:28, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer (en.wikipedia version)

title: Help talk:Searching


text:
Help:Section

A page can be divided into sections, using the section header syntax.

See Also MediaWiki feature list

Creation of sections
Sections are created by creating their headers, see en:Wikipedia:Section

Standard TOC
For each page with more than three headings, a table of contents (TOC) is automatically generated from the section headings, unless:
 * (for a user) preferences are set to turn it off
 * (for an article) in the edit box the magic word   is added

With or  in the wikitext a TOC is added even if the page has fewer than four headings.

With the TOC is put before the first section header. With, it is put at the position of this code. This allows any positioning, also e.g. on the right, and in a table cell, and it also allows multiple occurrence, e.g. in every section (demonstrated on m:Help talk:Section; however, this seems only useful if the sections are long, so that the TOCs take up only a small part of the total space.).

Thus there may be some introductory text before the TOC, known as the "lead". Although usually a header after the TOC is preferable, can be used to avoid being forced to insert a meaningless header just to position the TOC correctly, i.e., not too low.

Preferences can be set to number the sections automatically.

In a page calling a template with sections, the sections in the template are numbered according to their position in the rendered page, e.g. if the template tag is in the third section, then the first section of the template is numbered four. Any text in the template before its first section shows up as part of the section with the template tag, and any text after the tag before a new header shows up as part of the last section of the template. This may be done deliberately, but can usually better be avoided (see also below).

Compact TOC
Where you have a large number of very short headings (such as letters of the alphabet) you can get a very long table of contents. An alternative is a compact TOC. If you have a template at "Template:compactTOC" such as Wikipedia's, you can insert the following text:

which looks like this:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

You can do similar things with years or decades e.g.

1900s - 1910s - 1920s - 1930s - 1940s - 1950s - 1960s - 1970s - 1980s - 1990s - 2000s

Both of the above make use of section linking, see below.

See also compact TOC.

Linking to a section
In the HTML code for each section there is an anchor element HTML element "a" with both "name" and "id" attributes holding the section title. This enables linking directly to sections. These section anchors are automatically used by MediaWiki when it generates a Table of Contents for the page, but you can also use them to manually link directly to one section within a page.

The html code generated at the beginning of this section, for example, is:  Section linking

A link to this section (Section Linking) looks like this: Section Linking

From within the same page you can use  link_label , and from another page  link_label .

An underscore and number are appended to duplicate section names. E.g. for three sections named "Example", the names (for section linking) will be "Example", "Example_2" and "Example_3".

Note that using the date formatting feature in section headers complicates section linking.

An internal link in a section header does not give complications:  An external link in a section header does not seem to allow linking to that section from within Mediawiki, except from the TOC:
 *
 * Help:Section
 * http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Section#Demo_http:.2F.2Fa

For linking to an arbitrary position in a page see linking to a page.

Section linking and redirects
A link that specifies a section of a redirect page corresponds to a link to that section of the target of the redirect.

A redirect to a section of a page goes to the top of the page. One can use it anyway as a clarification, and at least it works when clicking on the link from the redirect page.

A complication is that, unlike renaming a page, renaming a section does not create some kind of redirect. Also there is no separate what links here feature for sections, pages linking to the section are included in the list of pages linking to the page. Possible workarounds:
 * put an anchor and link to that
 * put a comment in the wikitext at the start of a section listing pages that link to the section
 * make the section a separate page/template and either transclude it into, or just link to it from, its parent page; instead of linking to the section one can then link to the separate page.

Section editing
Sections can be separately edited ("section editing feature") by right clicking on the section header and/or special edit links, depending on the preferences set, and by a url like

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Help:Section&action=edit&section=2

(Note that here section numbers are used, not section titles; subsections have a single number, e.g. section 2.1 may be numbered 3, section 3 is then numbered 4, etc.)

This is convenient if the edit does not involve other sections and one needs not have the text of other sections at hand during the edit (or if one needs it, open the section edit link in a new window, or during section editing, open "Cancel" in a window). Section editing alleviates some problems of large pages.

Inserting a section can be done by editing either the section before or after it, merging with the previous section by deleting the header.

" " anywhere on the page will remove the edit links. It will not disable section editing itself, right clicking on the section header and the url still work.

Currently there is no link for editing the part before the first heading, except in the classic skin by right clicking on the page header, but the URL works, e.g. for this page:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Help:Section&action=edit&section=0

It can be obtained less cumbersomely by using an edit link and changing the number of the section to zero.

Subsections are included in the part of the page that is edited. Whether there is automatic section numbering is determined by the number of sections concerned, i.e. one plus the number of sub- and subsub-sections, etc. Section numbering is relative to the part that is edited, so on the relative top level there is always just number 1, relative subsections all have numbers starting with 1: 1.1., 1.2, etc.; e.g., when editing section 3.2, section 3.2.4 is numbered 1.4. However, the header format is according to the absolute level.

The edit page shows the list of templates used on the whole page, i.e. also the templates used in other sections.

The preview in section editing does not always show the same as the corresponding part of the full page, e.g. if on the full page an image in the previous section intrudes into the section concerned.

See also Help:Edit summary, Help:Section editing demo.

Editing a page with large sections
If a page has very large sections, or is very large and has no division into sections, and one's browser or connection does not allow editing of such a large section, then one can still:
 * append a section by specifying a large section number (too large does not matter); however, one has to start with a blank line before the new section header
 * append content to the last section by not starting with a blank line; however, with the limitations of one's browser or connection, one cannot revert this, or edit one's new text.

If one can view the wikitext of a large section, one can divide the page into smaller sections by step by step appending one, and finally deleting the original content (this can be done one large section at a time). Thus temporarily there is partial duplication of the content, so it is useful to put an explanation in the edit summary.

Opening a link in a header in a new window
When right click editing is enabled, you cannot right click a link in a header to open it in a new window, etc. However most browsers have an alternative way of doing that (Mozilla: middle click, ctrl+left click, type ahead find, TAB navigation; IE: shift+left click).

Horizontal dividing line
A horizontal dividing line as a division demarcation is not taken into account in the section numbering and TOC. Therefore it should not be used for dividing a page in sets of sections.

"See also" line or section
If a page consists of sections and a "see also" refers to the whole page, then make it a separate section. This is to avoid it becoming part of the prior section, to make it visible in the TOC, and to make it easily accessible through the TOC.

Alternatively, a "see also" line is sometimes put at the beginning.

A "see also" belonging to just one section can be put in that section: within a paragraph, as a separate paragraph, or as a subsection.

Text in a large font that should not begin a section
When using text in a large font that should not begin a section, e.g. to show a font, use something like

 Example text

giving

 Example text

Blank space as header
If a (sub)section has a blank space as header, it results in a link in the TOC that does not work.

Sections vs. separate pages vs. transclusion
Advantages of separate pages:
 * what links here feature
 * automatic redirect on renaming
 * redirect to a section is not possible
 * loading a small page is faster than loading a large page

Advantages of one large page with sections:
 * loading one large page is faster and more convenient than loading several small ones
 * searching within one large page (the page itself or the wikitext) with a local search function is faster and in some respects better than searching several pages (for which one has to search the whole project); also the TOC provides for convenient navigation.

Another alternative is composing a page of other pages using the template feature (creating a compound document by transclusion). This allows easy searching within the combined rendered page, but not in the combined wikitext. Titles have to be provided.

Subdivisions in general

 * Sections of a page are adjacent, and the end of the last section coincides with the end of the page, i.e., no other part of a page is not in a section than a possible part before the first section.
 * The same applies at lower levels, i.e. in sections and subsections.
 * In a list in a section, each list item is a kind of subsection; however, lists need not be adjacent, i.e., between lists there may be content at the section level, after which the list items of the following list are content which is down again to list item level.
 * In HTML, a list item may contain several sublists, not necessarily adjacent; thus there may be parts of the list not only before the first sublist, but also between sublists, and after the last one; however, in wiki-syntax-lists, sublists follow the same rules as sections (see the first item in this list): the only possible part of the list not in sublists is before the first sublist.

See also continuing a list item after a sub-item.

Demo a
This section is linked to from.

Demo http://a
This section is linked to from.

title: Help:Section


text:
Help talk:Section

Meta:Help:Section authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Section =
 * 03:35, 25 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed capitalization of template name.)
 * 05:40, 3 October 2005 User:Lobotomy m ("span" is the appropriate tag, not the deprecated "font".)
 * 01:42, 11 September 2005 User:128.6.77.37
 * 01:38, 11 September 2005 User:128.6.77.37
 * 20:28, 31 August 2005 User:164.54.56.3 (→Subdivisions in general - fixed See-also link)
 * 21:25, 12 August 2005 User:Patrick (→Compact TOC - See also compact TOC)
 * 17:55, 5 August 2005 User:68.248.246.220 (→Standard TOC - less/fewer!)
 * 17:57, 3 August 2005 User:69.22.253.2
 * 01:44, 1 August 2005 User:131.107.0.101 (→See also - en:Wikipedia:Section redirects here now)
 * 12:52, 18 July 2005 User:218.111.225.128
 * 12:51, 18 July 2005 User:218.111.225.128
 * 14:54, 8 July 2005 User:Patrick (→Standard TOC - (demonstrated on m:Help talk:Section).)
 * 14:45, 8 July 2005 User:Patrick (This allows any positioning, also e.g. on the right, and in a table cell, and it also allows multiple occurrence, e.g. in every section.)
 * 21:15, 27 June 2005 User:Yath m (→Standard TOC)
 * 11:08, 27 June 2005 User:Patrick (If one can view the wikitext of a large section, one can divide the page into smaller sections by step by step appending one, and finally deleting the original content (this can be done one large sect)
 * 10:33, 27 June 2005 User:Patrick m (→Editing a page with large sections)
 * 10:32, 27 June 2005 User:Patrick (==Editing a page with large sections==)
 * 18:28, 22 June 2005 User:TreyHarris (→Compact TOC - deal with the case where the template doesn't exist--this makes it sound like it's built in)
 * 21:11, 10 June 2005 User:Patrick (==Subdivisions in general==)
 * 16:01, 9 June 2005 User:Patrick (→Section editing - (Note that here section numbers are used, not section titles.))
 * 14:54, 9 June 2005 User:82.47.218.81 (→Linking to a section)
 * 21:54, 4 June 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 200.82.115.250 to last version by Patrick)
 * 18:39, 4 June 2005 User:200.82.115.250 (→Demo http://a)
 * 10:29, 1 June 2005 User:Patrick m (→Sections vs. separate pages vs transclusion)
 * 08:06, 1 June 2005 User:Patrick (*make the section a separate page/template and either transclude it into, or just link to it from, its parent page; instead of linking to the section one can then link to the separate page.)
 * 07:46, 17 May 2005 User:203.200.50.246 (→Creation of sections)
 * 22:36, 13 May 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 71.243.155.230 to last version by Patrick)
 * 21:34, 13 May 2005 User:71.243.155.230
 * 21:33, 13 May 2005 User:71.243.155.230 (→Kiss my butt)
 * 09:38, 9 May 2005 User:Patrick (→Demo http://a - This section is linked to from #Linking to a section.)
 * 09:38, 9 May 2005 User:Patrick (→Demo a - This section is linked to from #Linking to a section.)
 * 09:36, 9 May 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 207.216.103.241 to last version by Patrick)
 * 23:07, 8 May 2005 User:207.216.103.241
 * 08:40, 3 May 2005 User:Patrick m (→Section editing)
 * 08:21, 3 May 2005 User:Patrick (→Editing sections of included templates - replace by template, to be included in Help:Template also)
 * 11:10, 1 May 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 61.50.175.108 to last version by Patrick)
 * 09:03, 1 May 2005 User:61.50.175.108 (→"See also" line or section)
 * 21:44, 27 April 2005 User:Patrick m (→Linking to a Section)
 * 16:14, 27 April 2005 User:66.207.136.130 (Corrected document structure. --Eeyore)
 * 09:32, 25 April 2005 User:Patrick m (→Section editing)
 * 09:31, 25 April 2005 User:Patrick (The preview in section editing does not always show the same as te corresponding part of the full page, e.g. if on the full page an image in the previous section intrudes into the section concerned.)
 * 09:27, 25 April 2005 User:Patrick m (→Section editing)
 * 09:25, 25 April 2005 User:Patrick (→Section editing - Even on a section edit page the list of templates used on the whole page is given, i.e. also the templates used in other sections.)
 * 09:19, 25 April 2005 User:Patrick (Section numbering is relative to the part that is edited, so on the relative top level there is always just number 1, relative subsections are 1.1., 1.2, etc.; e.g., when editing section 3.2, section)
 * 09:13, 25 April 2005 User:Patrick (→Section editing - Subsections are included in the part of the page that is edited. Whether there is automatic section numbering is determined by the number of sections concerned, i.e. one plus the)
 * 12:59, 21 April 2005 User:Patrick (→Editing sections of included templates)
 * 17:04, 20 April 2005 User:AnyFile (h:h)
 * 17:03, 20 April 2005 User:AnyFile (→See also - h:f)
 * 18:49, 26 March 2005 User:YebisYa m (→See also - parameter "langs" in )
 * 04:36, 25 March 2005 User:YebisYa (→Section editing - There is no longer the limit of five.)
 * 09:35, 24 March 2005 User:YebisYa m (→Section linking and redirects - direct link)
 * 08:01, 24 March 2005 User:YebisYa m (→Section linking - direct link)
 * 07:32, 24 March 2005 User:YebisYa m (→Table of contents (TOC) - direct link)
 * 16:49, 22 March 2005 User:YebisYa (revert to 08:25, 6 Mar 2005, and +"handbook sidebar|editor toc")
 * 14:44, 9 March 2005 User:65.93.73.56
 * 01:36, 8 March 2005 User:84.108.21.158 (→Compact TOC)
 * 01:34, 8 March 2005 User:84.108.21.158 (→Compact TOC)
 * 23:25, 5 March 2005 User:71.1.154.161 (→Section editing)
 * 14:25, 29 January 2005 User:Patrick (→Section linking - For linking to an arbitrary position in a page see linking to a page.)
 * 13:56, 29 January 2005 User:Patrick m (→Sections vs. separate pages vs transclusion)
 * 22:14, 23 January 2005 User:Patrick (→Sections vs. separate pages vs transclusion - update)
 * 19:07, 23 January 2005 User:Vrykolaka (→Sections vs. separate pages vs transclusion)
 * 09:18, 23 January 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 212.54.100.9 to last version by Moverton)
 * 08:31, 23 January 2005 User:212.54.100.9 (→Demo http://a)
 * 05:15, 11 January 2005 User:Moverton (rv vandalism)
 * 18:40, 9 January 2005 User:83.193.103.183 (→See also)
 * 15:07, 15 December 2004 User:Patrick m (→Section linking)
 * 15:05, 15 December 2004 User:Patrick (→See also - test -> demo, to avoid misunderstanding; this is part of the explanation this page provides)
 * 08:21, 15 December 2004 User:Eloquence (remove MediaWiki links, this page does not belong into the list of primary MediaWiki-relevant links, it is a help page for section editing intended for general wiki users)
 * 08:20, 15 December 2004 User:Eloquence (→Test sections for demo above - remove this section, testing should be done in the sandbox, not on Help: pages that will be imported into other wikis)
 * 03:27, 15 December 2004 User:AaronPeterson m
 * 23:45, 14 December 2004 User:Patrick (put TOC back at the top)
 * 18:43, 14 December 2004 User:152.2.81.61 (→Test a)
 * 18:41, 14 December 2004 User:152.2.81.61 (→Test a)
 * 05:52, 20 November 2004 User:Gangleri (→Section linking - anchor Section_linking_bugzilla_917 added)
 * 08:43, 16 November 2004 User:Patrick m (→Test sections for demo above)
 * 08:40, 16 November 2004 User:Patrick (→Section linking -An external link in a section header does not seem to allow linking to that section from within Mediawiki, except from the TOC:)
 * 08:33, 16 November 2004 User:Patrick (→Section linking - demo linking to section with link in header)
 * 08:32, 16 November 2004 User:Kate (→Sections vs. separate pages vs transclusion - this shouldn't be true any more)
 * 08:27, 16 November 2004 User:Patrick (→See also)
 * 18:14, 4 November 2004 User:PatrickFisher (→Section linking)
 * 15:04, 2 November 2004 User:Patrick (→Section linking - Note that using the date formatting feature in section headers complicates section linking.)
 * 23:14, 31 October 2004 User:Patrick m (→Section editing)
 * 23:12, 31 October 2004 User:Patrick m (→Section editing)
 * 23:10, 31 October 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 23:08, 31 October 2004 User:Patrick (→Section editing -bug 156)
 * 23:00, 31 October 2004 User:Patrick (→Section editing - Currently there is no link for editing the part before the first heading, except in the classic skin by right clicking on the page header,)
 * 11:54, 24 September 2004 User:AaronPeterson m (→Sections vs. separate pages)
 * 15:21, 23 September 2004 User:Patrick (→Editing sections of included templates)
 * 15:15, 23 September 2004 User:Patrick (→Table of contents (TOC))
 * 15:12, 23 September 2004 User:Patrick (update: In a page calling a template, sections in the template are numbered according to their position in the rendered page, e.g. if the template tag is in the third section, then the first secti)
 * 14:58, 23 September 2004 User:Patrick (→Editing sections of included templates)
 * 14:34, 23 September 2004 User:Patrick (→Editing sections of included templates)
 * 14:27, 23 September 2004 User:Patrick (→Section editing -====Editing sections of included templates====)
 * 21:56, 21 September 2004 User:Kate (→Section editing - this is no longer true)
 * 16:24, 2 September 2004 User:Patrick (→Section editing)
 * 15:56, 2 September 2004 User:Patrick (→Section editing)
 * 15:45, 2 September 2004 User:Patrick (→Section editing - NOEDITSECTION)
 * 13:36, 28 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Section editing - If this section does not exist, one gets an empty edit box and the result is added at the end of the last section of the referring page.)
 * 13:28, 28 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Section editing - As if one could edit sections in an embedded template, edit links are present and right clicking on section titles leads to an edit page, but both lead to the wrong section: the)
 * 10:45, 21 August 2004 User:Patrick m (→Section editing)
 * 10:37, 21 August 2004 User:Patrick m (→Editing of individual sections)
 * 10:35, 21 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Editing of individual sections)
 * 10:30, 21 August 2004 User:Patrick (Preview during section editing does not work properly with regard to multiple inclusion of the same template in a page: the limit of)
 * 10:20, 21 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Editing of individual sections - one needs not have the text of other sections at hand during the edit (or if one needs it, open the section edit link in a new window, or during section editing, o)
 * 10:09, 21 August 2004 User:Patrick m (→See also)
 * 07:22, 17 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Sections vs. separate pages - The same template can not be included more than five times in the same page.)
 * 08:56, 6 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Sections vs. separate pages - Another alternative is composing a page of other pages using the template feature. This allows easy searching within the combined rendered page, but not in the combin)
 * 07:38, 6 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Sections vs. separate pages - *redirect to a section is not possible)
 * 07:36, 6 August 2004 User:Patrick (==Sections vs. separate pages==)
 * 06:33, 6 August 2004 User:Patrick (→Section linking -A complication is that, unlike renaming a page, renaming a section does not create some kind of redirect. Also there is no separate help:what links here feature for sections,)
 * 11:27, 25 July 2004 User:Patrick (bug found by Eequor)
 * 11:22, 25 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Large text that should not begin a section)
 * 21:55, 12 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Section linking -An interwiki link to a section of a page on a sister wiki goes to the top of the page, use external link style instead.)
 * 21:46, 12 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Section linking -This enables linking to the sections from the lines of the TOC, but also from other webpages, bookmarks, etc.)
 * 21:31, 12 July 2004 User:Patrick (The top of each section has in the HTML code a HTML element "a" with both a "name" and an "id" attribute with the section name. If there a)
 * 14:26, 10 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Section linking)
 * 09:50, 9 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Section linking - A link that specifies a section of a redirect page corresponds to a link to that section of the target of the redirect.)
 * 09:43, 9 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Editing of individual sections)
 * 09:38, 9 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Section linking - Section linking does not work in a redirect or in an interwiki link.)
 * 05:33, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (in the case of <nowiki></nowiki>, at the position of this code. Thus there may be some introductory text before it, known as the "lead". Although usually a header after the TOC is preferable, <)
 * 13:27, 27 June 2004 User:Patrick (→Editing of individual sections - <nowiki></nowiki> disables section editing.)
 * 07:47, 25 June 2004 User:Patrick m (→Compact TOC)
 * 07:46, 25 June 2004 User:Patrick (rm (like on en:) When individual section editing does not work)
 * 08:28, 24 June 2004 User:Patrick (When using large text that should not begin a section, e.g. to show a font, use something like)
 * 19:46, 21 June 2004 User:Patrick m (→Table of contents (TOC))
 * 19:44, 21 June 2004 User:Patrick (With <nowiki></nowiki> in the wikitext a TOC is added even with less than four sections.)
 * 02:18, 13 June 2004 User:Patrick (→Editing of individual sections - rm Unlike one may assume, an edit conflict may still occur if two users edit different sections at the same time.)
 * 01:59, 13 June 2004 User:Patrick (→Editing of individual sections - MediaWiki User's Guide: Section editing)
 * 10:43, 12 June 2004 User:Patrick (misc)
 * 10:21, 12 June 2004 User:Patrick (adapting to Meta (rm project-specific things))
 * 10:11, 12 June 2004 User:Patrick (copied from wp, to be edited)

title: Help talk:Section


text:
Help:Self link

A self link is a link to the page itself. It appears as bold text when the article is viewed ("self-link feature"). Examples:
 * Help:Self link gives Help:Self link
 * piped self link gives piped self link

An indirect self link is a link to a page that redirects back. In this case the self-link feature does not work, even though the feature would be equally useful here; if you are viewing the master copy on Meta of this help page then this is demonstrated here:
 * Self link

Also, when the prefix for the project itself is added (interwiki link style, but again linking to the page itself) the self-link feature does not work; if you are viewing the master copy on Meta of this help page then this is demonstrated here:
 * m:Help:Self link gives m:Help:Self link

Self-link to a section
For a link to a section of the same article, even from the same section, the self-link feature does not work: Help:Self link.

title: Help:Self link


text:
Help talk:Self link

Meta:Help:Self link authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Self link =
 * 02:42, 25 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Changed initial template.)
 * 18:44, 17 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Removed link to Wikipedia article that duplicates this.)
 * 00:42, 12 November 2005 User:Patrick m
 * 00:40, 12 November 2005 User:Patrick m
 * 00:23, 12 November 2005 User:Patrick m
 * 00:21, 12 November 2005 User:Patrick (A link to a section of the same article, even from the same section, the self-link feature does not work: Help:Self link#Self-link to a section.)
 * 09:59, 19 April 2005 User:Patrick m
 * 09:34, 19 April 2005 User:Patrick
 * 09:29, 19 April 2005 User:Patrick (Also, when the prefix for the project itself is added (interwiki link style, but again linking to the page itself) the self-link feature does not work; if you view the master copy of this help page th)
 * 09:22, 19 April 2005 User:Patrick (self-link feature)
 * 10:51, 24 June 2004 User:Patrick (links)
 * 10:43, 24 June 2004 User:Patrick (adapted from en:)

title: Help talk:Self link


text:
Help:Short words in searches

Changing minimum and maximum word lengths in MySQL
From MySQL's docs on Fine-Tuning MySQL Full-Text Search: The minimum and maximum length of words to be indexed is defined by the  and   system variables (available as of MySQL 4.0.0). See Section 5.3.3, “Server System Variables”. The default minimum value is four characters. The default maximum depends on your version of MySQL. If you change either value, you must rebuild your  indexes. For example, if you want three-character words to be searchable, you can set the  variable by putting the following lines in an option file: [mysqld] ft_min_word_len=3 Then restart the server and rebuild your  indexes. Also note particularly the remarks regarding myisamchk in the instructions following this list.

title: Help:Short words in searches


text:
Help talk:Short words in searches

Meta:Help:Short words in searches authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Short words in searches =
 * User:Adam Katz (how to allow searches for shorter words)

title: Help talk:Short words in searches


text:
Help:Show preview

Below the edit box is a Show preview button. Pressing this will show you what the article will look like without actually saving it. It is strongly recommended that you use this prior to saving. This allows you to check what the page will look like first and to check that you haven't made any errors. It also prevents the need for multiple saves. Saving the same article a large number of times in quick succession makes it harder for people to check what changed, and clogs up the page history.

It is helpful, however, to save the page before moving a section of the article, if you have been making small edits to the article. The difference display is not good at showing paragraph moves, and will not display the small edits clearly if sections are then moved around.

Saving only once is also a way of avoiding edit conflicts, as people will not see the article on recent changes, and therefore they are less likely to try editing it at the same time as you.

If you are logged in, you can set your preferences to show the preview before the edit box instead of after it. If you select this option, the preview will be displayed above the edit box when you click the "Show preview" button while editing a page. See Help:Preferences.

As explained on Help:Editing, piped links can be used to automatically hide words in parentheses and to hide namespaces. The show preview option interprets the abbreviated form correctly, but does not expand it yet in the edit box. Press Save and again Edit, and you will see the expanded version.

Using show preview also prevents your login timing out, which would mean your edits would not be attributed to your user name. Clicking preview regularly will restart the timer, so you remain logged in. Also, if you are no longer logged in, showing a preview will make you aware of this so you can log in and save your work after that. You can check this by seeing if your user name appears in the upper-right corner when you press preview. If you are not logged in, open Special:Userlogin in a separate window (right-click "Log in" and hit "Open link in new window" or similar). Log in, then go back to your editing and hit "preview" again to make sure all is well. Note that this will clear the minor edit and watch checkboxes, so make sure they're set appropriately again before you finally save the page.

When utilizing this feature during a major edit, consider copying the content into your clipboard. On extremely rare occasions, the Wikipedia servers have hiccups, and you could lose your work.

title: Help:Show preview


text:
Help talk:Show preview

Meta:Help:Show preview authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Show preview =
 * 01:59, 25 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Changed initial template.)
 * 16:32, 17 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed internal links. Removed section dealing with Wikipedia-specific template. Added help templates.)
 * 16:18, 17 November 2005 User:Uncle G m (Transwiki:Wikipedia:Show preview moved to Help:Show preview)
 * 09:22, 17 November 2005 User:Uncle G's 'bot (TRANSWIKI: Copied from Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Show preview.)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Show preview authors and history
= From Wikipedia:Talk:Wikipedia:Show preview =
 * 2005-11-17 02:02:30 User:202.95.81.226 (→Inuse messages)
 * 2005-11-17 01:46:15 User:202.95.81.226 (→Inuse messages)
 * 2005-11-01 04:16:46 User:CanisRufus m (Bot: Changing category Wikipedia feature to Wikipedia features)
 * 2005-07-01 16:38:06 User:Kaare m (exit box -> edit box; added link to da:)
 * 2005-04-15 15:59:56 User:Omegatron (not sure how to phrase this)
 * 2005-02-12 03:55:50 User:Mirv m (→See also - fix ML lnks)
 * 2004-12-24 07:20:41 User:CatherineMunro m (typo: In --> If)
 * 2004-10-19 05:19:01 User:Netoholic (→Inuse message - update for inusefor)
 * 2004-10-12 10:23:09 User:Gazpacho (revert spam)
 * 2004-10-12 10:21:01 User:219.134.14.7 (→See also)
 * 2004-10-07 19:01:49 User:UninvitedCompany m (category)
 * 2004-08-31 10:20:35 User:Mona-Lynn m
 * 2004-06-16 01:36:46 User:Niteowlneils m (→Msg:Inuse - -msg:)
 * 2004-06-04 04:22:28 User:Template namespace initialisation script
 * 2004-03-27 02:39:26 User:Meelar (more than advanced users can use "msg:inuse")
 * 2004-02-27 05:07:35 User:Minesweeper (note)
 * 2004-02-27 05:02:00 User:Kingturtle m
 * 2004-02-27 05:01:44 User:Kingturtle (use your clipboard....and for advanced users, use )
 * 2004-02-27 03:54:49 User:Angela (new help page with reasons you should use "show preview")

title: Help talk:Show preview


text:
Help:Special characters

Systems for character encoding
From MediaWiki 1.5, all projects use Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding.

Until the end of June 2005, when this new version came into use on Wikimedia projects, the English, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish Wikipedias used windows-1252 (they declared themselves to be ISO-8859-1 but in reality browsers treat the two as synonmous and the mediawiki software made no attempt to prevent use of stuff from windows-1252). Pre-upgrade wikitext in their databases remains stored in windows-1252 and is converted on load. Edits made since the upgrade will be stored as UTF-8 in the database. This conversion on load process is invisible to users.

 * Unicode (UTF-8)
 * a variable number of bytes per character
 * special characters, including CJK characters, can be treated like normal ones; not only the webpage, but also the edit box shows the character; in addition it is possible to use the multi-character codes; they are not automatically converted in the edit box.
 * ISO 8859-1
 * one byte per character
 * special characters that are not available in the limited character set are stored in the form of a multi-character code; there are usually two or three equivalent representations, e.g. for the character € the named character reference &euro; and  the decimal character reference &#8364; and the hexadecimal character reference &#x20AC;. The edit box shows the entered code, the webpage the resulting character. Unavailable characters which are copied into the edit box are first displayed as the character, and automatically converted to their decimal codes on Preview or Save.
 * the most common special characters, such as é, are in the character set, so code like &eacute;, although allowed, is not needed.

Note that Special:Export exports using UTF-8 even if the database is encoded in ISO 8859-1, at least that was the case for the English Wikipedia, already when it used version 1.4.

To find out which character set applies in a project, use the browser's "View Source" feature and look for such as this:

or

Editing
Many characters not in the repertoire of standard ASCII will be useful—even necessary—for wiki pages, especially for foreign language textbooks. This page contains recommendations for which characters are safe to use and how to use them. There are three ways to enter a non-ASCII character into the wikitext:

 * Use a link to a special character listed under the edit box to insert that character. Note however that some characters are not displayed in Internet Explorer:

In some fonts, e.g. Arial, all the characters in this box are displayed, but it is not convenient for a user to have to switch fonts between webpages.
 * Enter the character directly from a foreign keyboard, or by cut and paste from a "character map" type application, or by some special means provided by the operating system or text editing application. On ISO-8859-1 wikis some browsers will change characters outside the charset of the wiki into html numeric character entities (see below).
 * Use an HTML named character entity reference like .  This is unambiguous even when the server does not announce the use of any special character set, and even when the character does not display properly on some browsers. However, it may cause difficulties with searches (see below).
 * Use an HTML numeric character entity reference like .  Unfortunately some old browsers incorrectly interpret these as references to the native character set.  It is, however, the only way to enter Unicode values for which there is no named entity, such as the Turkish letters.  Note that because the code points 128 to 159 are unused in both ISO-8859-1 and Unicode, character references in that range such as   are illegal and ambiguous, though they are commonly used by many web sites. (Note they are not technically unused, but they map to rare control codes that are illegal in html.) Also note that almost all browsers treat iso-8859-1 as windows-1252, which does have printable characters in that space, and they often find their way into article titles on en, which really causes confusion when trying to create interwiki links to said pages.

Generally speaking, Western European languages such as Spanish, French, and German pose few problems. For specific details about other languages, see: Help:Turkish characters and Help:Romanian characters. (More will be added to this list as contributors in other languages appear.)

For the purpose of searching, a word with a special character can best be written using the first method. If the second method is used a word like Odiliënberg can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and|or nberg; this is actually a bug that should be fixed—the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent. See also Help:Searching.

Esperanto
Mediawiki installations configured for Esperanto use UTF-8 for storage and display. However when editing the text is converted to a form that is designed to be easier to edit with a standard keyboard.

The characters for which this applies are: Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, Ŝ, Ŭ, ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ. you may enter these directly in the edit box if you have the facilities to do so. However when you edit the page again you will see them encoded as Sx. This form is referred to as "x-sistemo" or "x-kodo". In order to preserve round trip capability when one or more x's follow these characters or their non-accented forms (A, G, H, J, S, U, c, g, h, j, s, u), the number of x's in the edit box is double the number in the actual stored article text.

For example, the interlanguage link Luxury car to Luxury car has to be entered in the edit box as Luxxury car on. This has caused problems with interwiki update bots in the past.

Browser issues
Some browsers are known to do nasty things to text in the edit box. Most commonly they convert it to an encoding native to the platform (whilst the nt line of windows is internally utf-16 it has a complete duplicate set of apis in the windows ansi code page and many older apps tend to use these especially for things like edit boxes). Then they let the user edit it using a standard edit control and convert it back. The result is that any characters that do not exist in the encoding used for editing get replaced with something that does (often a question mark though at least one browser has been reported to actually transliterate text!).

IE for the mac
This relatively common browser translates to mac-roman for the edit box with the result it munges most unicode stuff (usually but not always by replacing them with a question mark). It also munges things that are in ISO-8859-1 but not mac-roman (specifically ¤ ¦ ¹ ² ³ ¼ ½ ¾ Ð × Ý Þ ð ý þ and the soft hyphen) so the problems it causes are not limited to unicode wikis (though they tend to be much worse on unicode wikis because they affect actual text and interwiki links rather than just fairly obscure symbols).

Netscape 4.x
Similar issues to IE mac though the character set converted to and from will obviously not always be mac-roman.

Console browsers
Lynx links (in text mode) and W3M convert to the console character set (lynx actually using a transliteration engine) for editing and convert back on save. If the console character set is UTF-8 then these browsers are unicode safe but if it isn't they aren't. With lynx and links a possible detection method would be to add another edit box to the login form but this won't work for w3m as it doesn't convert the text to the console character set until the user actually attempts to edit it.

The workaround
After en switched to utf-8 and interwiki bots started replacing html entities in interwikis with literal unicode text, edits that broke unicode characters became so common they could no longer be ignored. A workaround was developed to allow broken browsers to edit safely provided mediawiki knew they were broken.

Browsers listed in the setting $wgBrowserBlackList (a list of regexps that match against user agent strings) are supplied text for editing in a special form. Existing hexadecimal html entities in the page have an extra leading zero added, non-ascii characters that are stored in the wikitext are repreresented as hexadecimal html entities with no leading zeros.

Currently the default settings only have IE mac and a specific version of netscape 4.x for linux in the blacklist. Nevertheless it seems to have stopped most of the problem. Hopefully the default list will be expanded in future but that relies on getting someone with cvs access to commit the changes.

Viewing
Most current browsers have some level of unicode support but some do it better than others. The most commonly encountered problem is that internet explorer relies on preconfigured font links in the registry rather than actually searching for a font that can display the character in question. This means that internet explorer often has to be forced to use particular fonts. On en there are a set of templates to do this. For example for general unicode text,  for polytonic greek and  for the international phonetic alphabet. The stuff in windows glyph list 4 should be safe to use without such special measures.

... may work, but only for people with that font.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs
E.g. gives   See Help:WikiHiero syntax.

This is not dependent on browser capabilities, because it uses images on the servers.

Hieroglyphs could also be represented using unicode however browser support for this is likely to be near nonexistant.

Linking text with special characters
Many users have settings giving underlined links. When linking a special character, in some cases the result may be mistaken for another character with a different meaning:

Linking + − < > ⊂ ⊃ gives x|+ − x|< x|> ⊂ ⊃ which may look like ± = ≤ ≥ ⊆ ⊇. In such cases one can better use a separate link:
 * A ⊂ B (see subset)

There is less risk of confusion if more than one character is linked, e.g. x|x > 3.

title: Help:Special characters


text:
Help talk:Special characters

Meta:Help:Special characters authors and history
= From Meta:Help talk:Special characters =
 * 18:48, 17 November 2005 User:Uncle G (Fixed hyperlinks that break when this page is copied to other projects.)
 * 15:43, 14 November 2005 User:203.218.129.131 (→Console browsers - Typo correction)
 * 23:41, 7 November 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 85.202.159.136 to last version by Patrick)
 * 18:34, 7 November 2005 User:85.202.159.136
 * 09:54, 3 November 2005 User:Patrick m (→Linking text with special characters)
 * 09:30, 3 November 2005 User:Patrick (→Linking text with special characters)
 * 09:27, 3 November 2005 User:Patrick (→Linking text with special characters)
 * 08:59, 3 November 2005 User:Patrick m (→Linking text with special characters)
 * 08:52, 3 November 2005 User:Patrick (from w:en:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics==Linking text with special characters==)
 * 00:05, 28 October 2005 User:Jcarroll m (→Editing)
 * 12:46, 18 October 2005 User:Patrick (In some fonts, e.g. Arial, all the characters in this box are displayed, but it is not convenient for a user to have to switch fonts between webpages.)
 * 12:31, 18 October 2005 User:Patrick (→Editing - Use a link to a special character listed under the edit box to insert that character. Note however that some characters are not displayed in Internet Explorer:)
 * 12:20, 18 October 2005 User:Patrick (→Viewing - but only for people with that font.)
 * 23:35, 16 October 2005 User:Patrick (→Viewing - <nowiki>...</nowiki> may work.)
 * 13:06, 21 September 2005 User:84.60.202.90 (→Console browsers - typo)
 * 01:18, 2 September 2005 User:Plugwash (→Console browsers)
 * 19:25, 1 September 2005 User:Plugwash (→Lynx)
 * 16:36, 1 September 2005 User:Amgine (→See also - deleted from wikipedia)
 * 16:18, 1 September 2005 User:Amgine m (→Systems for character encoding - spell)
 * 00:24, 20 August 2005 User:Plugwash (rv)
 * 08:57, 19 August 2005 User:210.251.254.142 (→Editing)
 * 05:39, 18 August 2005 User:KSmrq m (→Editing -  typo)
 * 01:23, 18 August 2005 User:Plugwash (→The workaround)
 * 01:23, 18 August 2005 User:Plugwash (→Netscape 4.x)
 * 17:50, 17 August 2005 User:Plugwash (→IE for the mac)
 * 16:02, 17 August 2005 User:Plugwash (→Viewing)
 * 15:59, 17 August 2005 User:Plugwash (→Editing)
 * 15:54, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.9 (→Editing)
 * 15:46, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.58 (→See also - put back section)
 * 15:43, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.9 (→IE for the mac)
 * 15:42, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.9 (→IE for the mac)
 * 15:41, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.9 (→IE for the mac)
 * 15:29, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.58 (→The workaround)
 * 15:28, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.58 (→The workaround)
 * 15:28, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.58 (→The workaround)
 * 15:26, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.58 (→The workaround)
 * 15:17, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.9
 * 14:43, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.9 (→Ways to enter special characters)
 * 14:39, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.58 (move lots of outdated text to talk page in preparation for rewriting)
 * 14:34, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.9 (→Systems for character encoding - reword)
 * 14:28, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.9 (oops changed wrong w)
 * 14:27, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.58 (→Systems for character encoding - seems section links are case sensitive)
 * 14:17, 17 August 2005 User:62.189.34.58 (→Systems for character encoding - clarify a bit and get tense right)
 * 06:18, 2 August 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 195.58.1.155 to last version by 62.189.34.58)
 * 04:46, 2 August 2005 User:195.58.1.155 (→Systems for character encoding)
 * 22:49, 18 July 2005 User:62.189.34.58 (→Systems for character encoding - i don't think converted forms of existing text ever get saved back to the database.)
 * 11:55, 16 July 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 85.250.217.251 to last version by Patrick)
 * 11:41, 16 July 2005 User:85.250.217.251
 * 19:38, 15 July 2005 User:Patrick m (Reverted edits by 83.36.40.210 to last version by 68.245.199.241)
 * 13:48, 15 July 2005 User:83.36.40.210 (→Systems for character encoding)
 * 03:04, 14 July 2005 User:68.245.199.241 (→Browser differences - fixed awkward wording)
 * 03:00, 14 July 2005 User:68.245.199.241 (→Greek letters and math symbols - fixed garbled sentences in last paragraph)
 * 01:12, 14 July 2005 User:Angela m (Reverted edits by 81.214.169.68 to last version by Patrick)
 * 00:38, 14 July 2005 User:81.214.169.68
 * 13:13, 27 June 2005 User:Patrick (Note that Special:Export exports using UTF-8 even if the database is encoded in ISO 8859-1, at least that was the case for the English Wikipedia, already when it used version 1.4.)
 * 13:09, 27 June 2005 User:Patrick (→Systems for character encoding - From MediaWiki 1.5, each project uses Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding.)
 * 03:35, 22 June 2005 User:Patrick (→See also - *w:en:Alphabets derived from the Latin)
 * 20:35, 17 June 2005 User:Brion VIBBER (→Systems for character encoding - Remove weird, probably not very helpful advice)
 * 15:50, 17 June 2005 User:24.128.207.80 (spelling, etc. in - →Ways to enter special characters)
 * 15:33, 17 June 2005 User:24.128.207.80 (→Systems for character encoding)
 * 23:02, 16 June 2005 User:Patrick m (→Systems for character encoding)
 * 22:32, 16 June 2005 User:Brion VIBBER (→Systems for character encoding)
 * 21:55, 16 June 2005 User:Patrick (→See also - *w:en:Character encodings in HTML/all characters)
 * 14:07, 16 June 2005 User:Patrick (→Systems for character encoding)
 * 13:02, 15 June 2005 User:Patrick m (→Esperanto)
 * 12:31, 15 June 2005 User:62.160.59.37 (→Esperanto)
 * 21:41, 11 June 2005 User:24.113.11.169 (→Ways to enter special characters)
 * 01:49, 29 May 2005 User:Plugwash (→Esperanto)
 * 01:01, 29 May 2005 User:Plugwash (→Ways to enter special characters)
 * 23:56, 28 May 2005 User:Plugwash (→Esperanto)
 * 14:14, 28 May 2005 User:Eloquence m (Reverted edits by 84.121.1.211 to last version by 212.239.164.12)
 * 14:05, 28 May 2005 User:84.121.1.211
 * 19:12, 16 May 2005 User:212.239.164.12
 * 19:40, 15 May 2005 User:81.250.147.49 (Show square-bracketed samples after each corresponding code)
 * 21:24, 6 May 2005 User:Patrick (rm dup)
 * 18:22, 6 May 2005 User:85.74.134.142
 * 18:21, 6 May 2005 User:85.74.134.142 (→External links)
 * 21:45, 2 May 2005 User:Plugwash (→Ways to enter special characters)
 * 23:25, 21 April 2005 User:TheDJ (hc -> h:f)
 * 20:46, 19 April 2005 User:Patrick m (→External links)
 * 15:59, 18 April 2005 User:Patrick m (→External links)
 * 15:40, 18 April 2005 User:Patrick
 * 15:30, 18 April 2005 User:Patrick (mv ills down)
 * 22:36, 10 April 2005 User:Plugwash (→Unicode)
 * 15:32, 19 February 2005 User:Nikai m (→Greek letters and math symbols - sp)
 * 01:54, 8 February 2005 User:Patrick m (→Systems for character encoding)
 * 01:37, 8 February 2005 User:Patrick (For example, the interlanguage link <nowiki>en:Luxury car</nowiki> to)
 * 01:30, 8 February 2005 User:Patrick (→Systems for character encoding)
 * 14:46, 2 January 2005 User:Kjell André m (→Systems for character encoding - A small change in one sentence)
 * 17:26, 12 December 2004 User:Jallan (→Greek letters and math symbols)
 * 17:14, 12 December 2004 User:Jallan (→Greek letters and math symbols)
 * 13:21, 8 December 2004 User:80.130.9.25 (revert to Revision as of 13:21, 1 Dec 2004)
 * 09:08, 8 December 2004 User:193.180.228.186 (Halsbandsaffären, The Affair of the Necklace, L´Affaire du collier)
 * 13:21, 1 December 2004 User:211.124.255.135
 * 13:19, 1 December 2004 User:211.124.255.135
 * 13:18, 1 December 2004 User:211.124.255.135
 * 13:00, 18 November 2004 User:Patrick (→See also -*w:Talk:Runic alphabet)
 * 22:18, 10 November 2004 User:Paddu (→Systems for character encoding - don't confuse newbies with windows-1252 which is not in use in wikimedia anyway)
 * 19:23, 6 November 2004 User:Lysdexia m (→Advanced Entities)
 * 19:19, 6 November 2004 User:Lysdexia (→Other common symbols - &hearts;)
 * 19:11, 6 November 2004 User:Lysdexia (→Greek letters and math symbols - )
 * 19:02, 6 November 2004 User:Lysdexia m (→Typeset-style Punctuation)
 * 18:56, 6 November 2004 User:Lysdexia m (→Unsafe characters)
 * 18:17, 6 November 2004 User:Lysdexia m
 * 18:16, 6 November 2004 User:Lysdexia m
 * 13:23, 24 October 2004 User:Anthony DiPierro (→Unicode)
 * 13:16, 24 October 2004 User:Anthony DiPierro (→Ways to enter special characters)
 * 13:16, 24 October 2004 User:Anthony DiPierro (→Ways to enter special characters)
 * 13:14, 24 October 2004 User:Anthony DiPierro (→Systems for character encoding)
 * 05:56, 23 October 2004 User:Marnen (→External links - Added link to Alan Wood's Unicode Resources.)
 * 05:46, 23 October 2004 User:Marnen m (→Greek letters and math symbols - changed <"final" sigma> to <final sigma> -- quotes are unnecessary.)
 * 05:42, 23 October 2004 User:Marnen (→ISO-8859-1 Characters - Mentioned that Mac OS X uses Unicode natively.)
 * 00:15, 1 October 2004 User:64.105.67.13 (typo)
 * 22:35, 30 September 2004 User:64.105.67.13 (Restoring inadvertent deletions)
 * 22:24, 30 September 2004 User:64.105.67.13 (Adding content)
 * 11:32, 9 September 2004 User:195.137.85.17 (→Unicode)
 * 08:37, 7 September 2004 User:Chameleon (→Typeset-style Punctuation)
 * 08:25, 7 September 2004 User:217.227.8.87 (Browsers not supporting numerical character entitites are very, very rare now)
 * 03:29, 19 August 2004 User:Patrick m (→External links)
 * 02:50, 19 August 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 22:03, 2 August 2004 User:Maha (German: utf-8)
 * 05:39, 1 August 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 22:11, 24 July 2004 User:Patrick (update Spanish)
 * 22:05, 21 July 2004 User:Patrick m (rv)
 * 12:07, 21 July 2004 User:80.4.224.4
 * 09:14, 15 July 2004 User:Patrick (→See also -*Help:Editing character formatting - subscript)
 * 08:11, 15 July 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 06:31, 15 July 2004 User:Patrick (*ISO-8859-1 - The Wikipedias in English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Spanish.)
 * 13:35, 13 July 2004 User:Patrick m (rv)
 * 11:18, 13 July 2004 User:80.4.224.4
 * 22:50, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (soon Spanish)
 * 22:06, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Greek letters and math symbols)
 * 21:22, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Hieroglyphs)
 * 21:21, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Hieroglyphs - This is not dependent on browser capabilities, because it uses images on the Wikimedia servers.)
 * 20:53, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (→See also - *Help:URL)
 * 13:31, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→External links)
 * 13:28, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→External links)
 * 13:19, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (→External links - *[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/index.htm Details of many unicode characters, including the named, decimal and hexadecimal character reference, showing for each ho)
 * 12:32, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (→External links - shows how the named and decimal character references look in one's browser)
 * 12:29, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 12:18, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (character entity reference)
 * 12:04, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (→External links - *HTML 4.0 Character Entity References)
 * 12:01, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Greek letters and math symbols)
 * 11:46, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Greek letters and math symbols -Compare &amp;nabla; and <nowiki><math> \nabla </math></nowiki>, giving &nabla; and <math> \nabla </math>, respectively. Depending on browser settings, the second ma)
 * 11:10, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (Windows-1252)
 * 11:00, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (→See also - extra link *Help:Formula)
 * 10:34, 7 July 2004 User:Patrick (<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> etc.)
 * 23:14, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (*http://www.unicode.org/charts/ Unicode character charts; hexadecimal numbers only; PDF files showing all characters independent of browser capabilities)
 * 23:11, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Browser differences)
 * 23:09, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Browser differences - For each, try to choose fonts which show all characters you need.)
 * 23:05, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Browser differences - rm dup/superfluous)
 * 22:57, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Browser differences -Also, since the font in the edit box may well be different from that of the rendered page, the browser may show the characters properly in one of the two areas and not in the)
 * 22:24, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (→See also - *Help:Romanian characters)
 * 22:21, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (→See also - Help:Turkish characters)
 * 22:21, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (*Help:Turkish characters)
 * 22:18, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (→CJK characters - rm dup)
 * 22:16, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (CJK)
 * 08:09, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (**the most common special characters, such as é, are in the character set, so code like &amp;eacute;, although allowed, is not needed.)
 * 08:00, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (misc)
 * 07:23, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 07:22, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 07:20, 6 July 2004 User:Patrick (The Esperanto Wikipedia uses UTF-8, but a character like &#348; is automatically converted into the alternative notation Sx, because in some browsers it may not display in the edit box, even if it dis)
 * 07:35, 5 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Browser differences -E.g., use w:Wikipedia:Sandbox.)
 * 21:22, 4 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Hieroglyphs)
 * 21:22, 4 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Hieroglyphs)
 * 21:21, 4 July 2004 User:Patrick (E.g. <nowiki><hiero>P2</hiero></nowiki> gives <hiero>P2</hiero>, see [[Help:WikiHiero syntax)
 * 22:57, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick
 * 12:39, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Browser differences)
 * 12:26, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Browser differences)
 * 11:27, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 11:14, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (E.g. this may happen with the character &#348;, displaying in your browser as Ŝ (copy: Ŝ); see the edit box how the two versions display there.)
 * 10:25, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Browser differences)
 * 10:21, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Browser differences - Since the text in the edit window usually uses an other font than the webpage itself, it is also possible that a character displays correctly on the webpage, but not in edit)
 * 09:54, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Browser differences -Alternatives include using a similar, more common symbol, or using an image, e.g. eo:Ŝablono:El: http://eo.wikipedia.org/upload/d/db/Ikono_tero_malgranda.png.)
 * 09:46, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (Not all characters are displayed in all browsers. Note that as a reader, it is best to use a browser with maximum capabilities, but as an author the least capable of the common browsers is a better gu)
 * 09:20, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 09:18, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (To try out which applies in a project, copy e.g. ☉ (this should be a circle with a dot inside) into the edit box; if it is still there after pressing Preview, the project uses UTF-8. On other projects)
 * 09:08, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (*Unicode - The non-western Wikipedias, some western Wikipedias including French, the Wiktionaries, Meta, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiquote)
 * 07:38, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (→CJK characters - To convert, in a UTF-8 project, in the wikitext, the codes to characters, copy the characters rendered in the webpage, into the edit box (for characters only, without markup).)
 * 07:13, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (→CJK characters - I tried it out, the special trick seems no longer needed.)
 * 07:12, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick m
 * 07:10, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (unavailable characters which are copied into the edit box are first properly displayed as character, and automatically converted to their codes on Preview or Save.)
 * 06:44, 3 July 2004 User:Patrick (Each MediaWiki project uses either of the following two systems for representing characters:)
 * 15:38, 2 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Unicode - shows for all possible values whether they work and how they look in your browser, using decimal code.)
 * 15:28, 2 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Unicode)
 * 15:17, 2 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→Unicode)
 * 15:06, 2 July 2004 User:Patrick m (→CJK characters)
 * 14:55, 2 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Advanced Entities - On projects where this does not work, upload a copy of the image to that project.)
 * 14:53, 2 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Advanced Entities -On the English Wikipedia it has been uploaded as an image, and can there be referenced as <nowiki>Image:Del.gif</nowiki>, or here and some other projects as <nowiki>http://e)
 * 14:46, 2 July 2004 User:Patrick (→Unicode -on your browser they give &#1049; and &#x419;, respectively.)
 * 14:39, 2 July 2004 User:Patrick (→ISO-8859-1 Characters - fix links (a small start))
 * 03:42, 12 June 2004 User:81.60.201.154 (added 'es' language link)
 * 00:48, 15 April 2004 User:Jroes m (Added a link to the next page in the guide)
 * 00:47, 15 April 2004 User:Jroes m (Added a link to the next page in the guide)
 * 06:15, 23 March 2004 User:148.63.65.106
 * 03:58, 27 February 2004 User:Angela m (link to en:show preview)
 * 00:32, 11 January 2004 User:63.207.61.214 (fix up links)
 * 11:16, 7 December 2003 User:Docu m (typo)
 * 11:10, 7 December 2003 User:Docu m (+samples for test)
 * 10:59, 15 November 2003 User:Docu (upd.)
 * 08:23, 15 November 2003 User:Ellisllk m (+ fr:)
 * 20:35, 13 November 2003 User:Daniel Mayer m
 * 20:35, 13 November 2003 User:Daniel Mayer m
 * 04:07, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer
 * 04:02, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer (For specific details about other langauges, see: Turkish (more will be added to this list as contributors in other languages appear).)
 * 04:00, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer (converted)
 * 03:53, 7 September 2003 User:Daniel Mayer (en.wikipedia version)

title: Help talk:Special characters


text:
Help:Special page

The namespace "Special:" consists of "special pages". These have no corresponding wikitext; they are created by the software on demand. Some depend on the preferences that have been set, e.g. classic or enhanced Recent Changes, and the number of titles in Recent Changes and the watchlist, etc.

Special pages for all users
All of the below linked Special pages produce content particular to whatever wiki you are viewing this document on. If you are looking for a list of the available Special pages from a given wiki, use its Special:Specialpages page to get a list, or try viewing the page on this wiki, then editing your web address to change the server name, leaving the page portion intact.

 * Special pages : Special:Specialpages : A list of all special pages
 * Preferences : Special:Preferences : Set your user preferences; for some project families, notably Wikicities, this applies for the whole family. See Help:Preferences.
 * My watchlist : Special:Watchlist : Show the pages you are watching. (Watchlist help)
 * Recent changes : Special:Recentchanges : The latest edits in the project.
 * Upload file : Special:Upload : Upload a file to the wiki.
 * Image list : Special:Imagelist : List of images uploaded that can be sorted by size or date
 * User list : Special:Listusers : A list of all registered users. For some project families, notably Wikicities, this applies for the whole family.
 * Admins list : Special:Listadmins : A list of all Administrators.
 * Statistics : Special:Statistics : total number of pages and users
 * Random page : Special:Randompage : redirects to a random page from the main namespace which is not a redirect.
 * Orphaned pages : Special:Lonelypages : Lonely articles.
 * Uncategorized pages : Special:Uncategorizedpages : Pages without category tags (note that after adding a tag to a page refreshing this page does not immediately reflects the change)
 * Unused images : Special:Unusedimages
 * Wanted pages : Special:Wantedpages : Articles which have been requested / most wanted.
 * Short pages : Special:Shortpages - pages in the main namespace, with size (of the wikitext excluding that of templates used) in bytes, in order of increasing size
 * Long pages : Special:Longpages - pages in the main namespace, with size in bytes, in order of decreasing size
 * New pages : Special:Newpages : new pages in the main namespace - newest pages in the main namespace, with creation date and time, current size, user who created the page, and first edit summary, in reverse order of creation
 * Oldest pages : Special:Ancientpages - pages in the main namespace, with creation date and time, in order of creation
 * Dead-end pages : Special:Deadendpages : Pages without any outgoing links.
 * All pages : Special:Allpages : all pages in a specified namespace in alphabetical order, including redirects (unfortunately without showing which are redirects); is on Wikimedia sometimes temporarily disabled.

 * List of blocked IP addresses and usernames : Special:Ipblocklist : Blocked IPs and usernames
 * Book sources : Special:Booksources : ISBN Book Sources
 * Categories : Special:Categories
 * Export pages : Special:Export : Produces an XML file containing the wikitext and metadata of either the current version only, or all revisions, of one or more pages, specified in the form of a list; the XML file is in the format required for Special:Import; exporting is typically done either in preparation of applying the latter at another MediaWiki project, or for searching within old page revisions. See Help:Export and import.
 * Version : Special:Version : The version of the software the site is currently running
 * Wikimedia Board of Trustees election : Special:Boardvote : Voting software for the now finished elections
 * Special:SiteMatrix : list of all projects

 * Talk page : Special:Mytalk : Link to the talk page of the user who follows it.

Restricted special pages

 * Block user : Special:Blockip : Sysop only. Used to block or unblock users, IPs and ranges of IPs.

 * Restore deleted page : Special:Undelete : Sysop only. One way to undelete a page.
 * Make a user into a sysop : Special:Makesysop : Bureaucrat only.
 * Lock database : Special:Lockdb : Developer only. Puts the wiki in read only mode.
 * Unlock database : Special:Unlockdb : Developer only. Puts the wiki in read/write mode.
 * Show process list : Special:ShowProcesslist : Developer only.

Currently unavailable special pages

 * SQL query : Special:Asksql : Sysop only. Database interface for running queries. Currently disabled.
 * All system messages : Special:Allmessages : Displays all pages in the MediaWiki namespace. Currently disabled.
 * Unicode Converter : Special:UnicodeConverter : Converts Unicode to HTML entities : Not currently available outside of the test wiki
 * Popular pages : Special:Popularpages : The most visited pages. Currently disabled.
 * Maintenance page : Special:Maintenance : Currently disabled.

Logs

 * Special:Log - combined display of upload, deletion, protection, blocking, and sysop logs. You can narrow down the view by selecting a log type, the user name (case-sensitive!), or the affected page (usual case-sensitivity, but full name required, e.g. "Image:Map South Holland.png".

Old logs on   , until Dec 2004:

 * :Block log - blocks and unblocks
 * :Deletion log - deleted and undeleted pages
 * :Protection log - protected and unprotected pages
 * :Upload log - list of images uploaded

Miscellaneous
Special pages can be linked to as usual, like Special:Recentchanges.

Special pages requiring a target page:
 * Special:Recentchangeslinked/Help:Template
 * Special:Whatlinkshere/Help:Template

Special pages requiring a target user:
 * Special:Contributions/Jimbo Wales

Special page allowing a starting page: In some cases the full URL has to be given, like an external link, for example /w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges&days=3&limit=10 (last 10 changes).
 * Special:Allpages/Template (Standard prefixes are ignored, compare Special:Allpages/Template:C and Special:Allpages/Templat:C)

Redirects to Special pages have been disabled  because of their complications.

"Special:" in URLs is e.g. "Speciaal" in Dutch, "Spezial" in German, "Speciális:" in Hungarian and "מיוחד:" in Hebrew. See e.g the prefix of "Recentchanges" in the URL of the link to the Recent changes.

On a special page the tab labelled with the namespace, in this case "Special Page", oddly links to the Main page.

title: Help:Special page