CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mediawiki
Mike
Mike

Reputation:

change mediawiki namespaces?

Is there a way to reassign or change the core namespaces of mediawiki? For example, I'm having difficulty linking to a page I want to call "Template" because mediawiki has a namespace already for Template. I'd like to re-assign the mediawiki "template" namespace to something else.

Any thoughts?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1805

Answers (3)

Craig Hubley
Craig Hubley

Reputation: 9

I would advise very strongly against changing the names of any standard namespace. A name like "template" is so generic that surely you can find something else. For instance if you want to store code for C++ templates, call the namespace "Cpp_template" or "template_code".

Nothing in mediawiki prevents you from just using a colon as a prefix in a name, giving you exactly the same syntax as "supported" namespaces. I use that often. If it becomes helpful to differentiate those namespaces, e.g. for searching, then yes you can support them by editing LocalSettings.php (get the capitalization right folks, it matters in English, Linux shells and mediawiki).

For instance if I want to mark out a term as potentially problematic or biased, I use a "term:" prefix, for things like "term:Make_America_Great_Again" or "term:MAGA" which means the exact opposite of what its proponents claim. If I want to mark out verb phrases used in a user interface, it's "verb:delete" etc. For most of these it's not actually necessary to "support" the namespace.

You should ruthlessly customize namespaces and (even more so) categories for your task and purposes. If you are copying categories from some other wiki, you are probably doing it wrong. If you have not created any custom namespaces at least in the informal way I suggest, you are again probably doing it wrong.

But renaming standard namespaces or pages is a bad idea. You can use redirects for some of the same purposes. For instance, some "Special" pages have confusing and semantically inappropriate names that don't fit Wikipedia's or English language conventions. So I always redirect things like "Special:Wantedpages" with a new name like "open_links_in_this_wiki" which is semantically exact and doesn't tell people to just go create "wanted" pages with garbage in them instead of waiting to figure out if the name is appropriate or converging.

As a general rule, if you can't use the name easily in an English language sentence and [[just put brackets around it]], you need a redirect or rename.

Upvotes: 1

Cole
Cole

Reputation: 31

You can partly change the name, under localsettings.php, add extra namespaces with the code number of template like adding main as 0, main:Main Page will redirect to Main Page

Upvotes: 3

Adrian Archer
Adrian Archer

Reputation: 2323

Basically, no.

You can change the display names of the namespaces in Special:AllMessages, and you can make aliases for the namespaces with $wgNamespaceAliases, but I don't think you can actually change the underlying names.

For example, to go to the talk page for Stack Overflow on the german wikipedia you can use http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Stack_Overflow or http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Stack_Overflow and they both take you to the same place.

BUT: The english wikipedia there is a page called Template and I just tested by making a page called Template on my wiki with no problems. So maybe it isn't the template namespace interfering. When I made a link to Template on my wikipedia userpage with [[Template]] it linked to the article Template, not to the name space.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions