Chapter 3 Editing in MediaWiki

In MediaWiki, nearly all page-specific actions are accessible through what are usually tabs, though it depends on the skin: in some cases the “tabs” are just links displayed on the side, and in the case of Vector, which is the default skin, some of the tab actions are dropdown links, viewable alongside the main tabs. The exact set of tabs/dropdown actions/etc. one sees depends on the type of page it is, the permissions one has, and the extensions installed. Figure 3 shows the standard view of tabs and dropdown actions that an administrator would see, for a regular page in a fictional “Algebra Wiki”, with the Vector skin (along with the search interface alongside it, and a star icon in order to watch or unwatch the page – see here for more information on watching pages).

The edit page consists of, essentially, one big text area, plus some helper inputs at the bottom, including, most notably, the “Save page” button. The text of the page, or section, being edited goes in the big text area; it is meant to be written in a syntax called wikitext, which is simpler than HTML but which can also include a lot of scripting-like functionality (this is covered in all of Chapter 4).

The WikiEditor extension , which is bundled in with MediaWiki, is a fairly indispensable extension that provides a nice toolbar above the editing area with support for special characters (symbols, and non-Latin characters), and other features. Figure 3 shows what it looks like, with the “Advanced” option selected, and figure 3 shows what it looks like with the “Special characters” option selected. “Special characters” provides support for entering a variety of non-keyboard symbols: accented Latin characters, symbols, and 15 other alphabets. And the other buttons provide all sorts of formatting and syntax; the “picture” icon in the top bar (the one that looks like mountains) even lets you upload an image or other file, and insert it into this page.

The WikiEditor toolbar can be customized to add additional icons and menus, using JavaScript; the “Cite” option shown in the figures is one example of such customization, used within Wikipedia. See here for documentation on how to add customizations:

Of special note also is the pen icon, which, when clicked, makes the editing area look more like a code editor, or IDE (integrated development environment) for wikitext, with line numbering, syntax highlighting, and bracket matching. This functionality is especially useful when editing templates. This icon is provided by the CodeMirror extension , which hooks into WikiEditor:

Besides WikiEditor, there is also the Page Forms extension, which lets you provide a form for editing, in addition to or instead of the standard edit page; this extension is covered in depth in Chapter 17.

Here is what the bottom of the edit page looks like, below the main input for the text, for a fictional “Dolphin Wiki”:

In the “Summary” field, the user is supposed to summarize their changes in the current edit; this is very useful when looking at the page history later. Clicking “Watch this page” adds this page to the user's watchlist (which we'll get to later in this chapter). “Save page” of course saves the page. “Show preview” shows what the page will look like if it's saved in its current state, while leaving the edit form underneath the preview, so that the user can keep editing. “Show changes” shows the differences between the current text and the saved page, again with the edit form placed at the bottom. It's generally a good idea to hit both of these before saving a page, to make sure that everything looks alright, and that nothing was deleted, or added, accidentally. Finally, “Cancel” is simply a link that takes the user back to the regular page.

A WYSIWYG-style editor for MediaWiki, then, has to take a split approach: true WYSIWYG for regular wikitext (including handling of bold, italics, headers, tables and the like), and an alternate approach for template calls, to let users add and edit them. (The Page Forms extension, discussed in detail in Chapter 17, also provides a form-based approach for editing template calls.) Such an editor might better be described with the alternate acronym WYSIWYM , for “what you see is what you mean”, which implies a looser connection between what's on the editing screen and what shows up on the page. Though it's less well-known, WYSIWYM is a standard approach for word-processing software (this book was in fact created with a WYSIWYM editing tool, LyX).

But back to VisualEditor. Figure 3 shows the row of tabs on the English-language Wikipedia, for users who have enabled VisualEditor in their preferences. "Edit" brings the user to the VisualEditor interface, while "Edit source" brings the user to the standard editing textarea.

Figures 3 and 3 show different aspects of VisualEditor in use, on the same article in the English-language Wikipedia: the standard editing interface, here used to edit a link (note how similar VE's display looks to standard MediaWiki page appearance), and the interface to edit a template call, here for the main infobox for the page.

Note the pencil icon at the top right of Figure 3 – it lets you toggle back and forth between VisualEditor editing and standard wikitext editing. Given that this toggle exists, there's actually no need for two separate editing tabs; and you can change it to one tab by just adding $wgVisualEditorUseSingleEditTab = true; to LocalSettings.php.

You may be wondering how the template parameters in Figure 3 each get their own help text; that is accomplished with the TemplateData extension, which is bundled in with MediaWiki.

You can read more about VisualEditor, and all its possible customizations, here:

For those who use the Page Forms extension, VisualEditor can also be embedded within textarea inputs in forms; you just need to install a helper extension, VEForAll. See here.

In addition to editing, VisualEditor can also be used to make MediaWiki's page diffs look more visual and easier to understand; see here.

Like VisualEditor, TinyMCE can be used within Page Forms forms; see here.

You can read more about the TinyMCE extension here:

Some pages hold text that's more akin to computer code than to wikitext: the most obvious example is pages in the “Module” namespace, defined for the Scribunto extension (here), but there are potentially also JavaScript pages (such as MediaWiki:Common.js), CSS pages (such as MediaWiki:Common.css), and so on. The CodeEditor extension, which is bundled in with MediaWiki, makes use of Ace, a popular open-source web-based code editor, to let you edit you such pages with tools including line numbering, syntax highlighting, and matching of parentheses and brackets. It is is very similar in concept to the CodeMirror extension (here), but it is used for pages that define code, unlike CodeMirror, which is used for pages that hold wikitext.

CodeEditor's documentation is viewable at:

Clicking on the date/time brings you to the page for that specific revision – each one has its own permanent URL. Going to the URL for a specific edit shows you the contents of the page at that time, in addition to some information at the top about that revision:

Administrators will also see links for “block” and “rollback” within the rows of the history page. These are both covered in the upcoming section, “Blocking and rollbacks”.

Figure 3 shows an example of one such display, from an edit made on December 8, 2019 to the article “Vickrey auction” on the English-language Wikipedia.

If you have the VisualEditor extension installed (here), you can enable page diffs to be “visual”, making use of VisualEditor's code to display the diff as a change to the HTML, which may be easier to understand for many users. Figure 3 shows how the visual diff appears for the same Wikipedia change we saw earlier. As you can see with the changed citation numbers, and the new reference at the end, visual diffs show not just the direct changes made by the user, but all resulting changes in the display. (There were some other, similar changes to the page in this diff that were snipped out, to keep the image size manageable.)

If you're an administrator, there are a few more links that you'll see on every row in the history page. Next to every username or IP address there will also be a "block" link, to block that person (see here). And, in the top row, near the "undo" link, there will also be a "rollback " link. This is a useful link, which automatically undoes the last edit to the page, as well as any edits made by that same user directly preceding the last one; there's no need to go through a second screen. It's especially useful for dealing with vandalism, when you know without a doubt that a certain user's changes are malicious and should all be undone. It should be used with caution in other circumstances, though: if, for instance, you just want to undo the last change you made to a page, if you hit "rollback" you may be surprised to see that more than one of your edits has been reverted, potentially going all the way back to the first revision of the page. (Though it should be noted that the change done by the rollback is simply recorded as another edit, so the rollback can itself easily be undone.)

If you add this line, any administrator who's logged in will see another checkbox on each row, and another button above the rows, reading (in English) "Change visibility of selected revisions". Selecting any number of checkboxes, and clicking the button, will bring you to a page reading "Delete/undelete revisions". Contrary to its name, this page does not actually delete anything, but rather hides certain revisions (though, as we'll see later, regular page deletions don't actually delete any content either). The interface is slightly more complex if more than one revision has been selected. Figure 3 shows the interface for one revision, and Figure 3 shows it for more than one.

To move a page, click on the tab or dropdown action labeled “Move”. You will then see an interface like the one in Figure 3.

If you have a large batch of pages that all need to be renamed in the same way, the Replace Text extension (here) may be helpful.