Talk:MediaWiki Administrator's Handbook

Why this? Why here?

There may be something on Meta like this as well. Who cares? I'm doing this mainly for new admins on Wikibooks, but I would like to make this generic for all Wikimedia admins as well. Feel free to jump in and help out with this. --Rob Horning 06:21, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Where is it... m:Help:Contents... m:Help:System admin... no, that is for users who edit php files... m:Help:Editor... m:Help:Reverting... "Admin-only "rollback" link"... I guess that there is no separate section of Meta for admins/sysops.

<complain>The current MediaWiki Handbook is a mess. Officially, this book is one-to-one with the "Help:" namespace at Meta, and each page can be copied to each Wikimedia project, but when I was copying Help:Introduction earlier today, I had several problems with broken and obsolete links on m:Help:Introduction which I tried to fix. Not only is there an entire set of deprecated pages under m:Documentation, but several pages (linked from m:Help:Hacker for example) are not in the "Help:" namespace. Further there were some red links that I changed to point to English Wikipedia; I also found stubs of encyclopedia articles at Meta. As for the content, some modules are outdated; the other modules document every obscure feature of MediaWiki 1.6devel without explaining them well.</complain>

A book that explains how to be an admin/sysop, and without all those confusing templates at Meta, is a good idea. I will not contribute much, but if the book becomes more generic (to include UseModWiki for example), then I might contribute, or maybe I will contribute to Wiki Science. Meanwhile, I might also try to fix the MediaWiki Handbook. Actually, I am not sure what I plan to do. --Kernigh 04:22, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Meta Source Material

This is another area where perhaps having a separate Wikibook on the subject is going to help clear up a mess on Meta as well. The key sources for assisting Admins (sysop status) on MediaWiki projects is not m:Help:System admin but rather m:Help:Moderator, as what on Wikimedia projects we call Admins are really moderators from the double speak that takes place on the meta pages. What the MediaWiki handbook calls administrators is really developers, or people who have direct access to the computers that are running MediaWiki software. Admins on Wikibooks and other Wikimedia projects don't have that level of access (unless they are working to become a developer). There are some gems in some other pages of the MediaWiki handbook that may be useful for admins, but it takes time to sort through all of the extra material to find it, as the MediaWiki handbook in those sections is geared more toward the developers and people running their own MediaWiki server. --Rob Horning 07:40, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Rename to MediaWiki Administrator's Handbook?

I think the book should be renamed. Many non-Foundation sites use MediaWiki now and a good portion of the info (deleting, banning, etc. etc.) would be just as applicable to them as to us. Of course there could still be Foundation-exclusive pages like explaining Vfd and whatnot. Garrett^Talk 21:51, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm not tied to this particular name myself. There are some unique aspects of the Wikimedia culture that do need explaining to the non-initiated, but most of that can be translated to other projects as well. It is also something that other projects could learn from as well, especially when dealing with larger projects. Attempting to be a moderating force in a collaborative writing environment is an interesting community role to play, and where the true strength of being an admin really comes into play. --Rob Horning 14:58, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Moving this book to the Help namespace

This was a stealth move when a bunch of other stuff was happening. I don't think this belongs in the help namespace, although that can be up to debate. I originally wrote this as a book that would be a conventional Wikibook, even though the emphasis is indeed to be of assistance to sysops of MediaWiki projects.

Given no major objection for a couple of weeks, I'm going to revert the book name back to the main namespace and out of the help namespace. This is a conventional Wikibook, and I hope that people contribute to it as such. It was never my intention to make this a Wikibooks-specific manual. --Rob Horning 19:47, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

How to differentiate each target audience for each MediaWiki reference manual:
Developer, Sysop, Admin, Editor, User

Peter Blaise says: I think there is poor identification and differentiation of who uses and who works in, on, around, and under a wiki. Rather than just duplicating existing resources, I suggest we brainstorm and come up with something new. I suggest a functional analysis - how each user / worker functions, what they do, and how they do it. Here are a few overlapping levels of users / workers as I experience Mediawiki installations, in order here from top (customer / end user) down to the penultimate service provider, the original coder. I find that I'm dividing my time and paying attention to three areas in my Mediawiki installations:

Content - User, Editor, Admin.

Here I see Users, Editors and Admins dealing with Articles, Discussion / Talk pages, and Categories.

Read and print content.

Contribute content.

Edit and manage content.

Manage Users, Editors, Admins.

Browser-level access to site controls.

Function - Admin, Sysop.

Here I see Admins and Sysops dealing with all the on-screen controls and what those controls do, and the underlying programs.

All of the above.

Access under the web browser.

Install, configure, update.

Operating System level tasks.

Structure - Sysop, Developer.

Here I see Admins, Sysops and Developers going behind the scenes, underneath the user interface, installing, configuring, updating, using the Operating System and other tools, and creating, finding, and installing enhancements.

Creates and modifies core software and extensions.

programmer

needs overview and details of programming.

installs, configures,

needs software choices and code information,

has access to "layers" below HTML, such as operating system and code edits.

I have no problem with one manual for all three - there just needs to be three levels of depth. Writing three or more separate manuals seems silly to me since each subsequent level of depth needs the previous level of information. I'll create a simple example:

Content User, Editor, Admin	Function Admin, Sysop	Structure Sysop, Developer
How to use the "navigation" menu	How to use the "navigation" menu	How to use the "navigation" menu
	How to edit the "navigation" menu	How to edit the "navigation" menu
	How to create new links in the "navigation" menu	How to create new links in the "navigation" menu
	How to change the appearance if the navigation menu (css)	How to change the appearance if the navigation menu (css)
		How to change the function of the "navigation" menu (php)

I can't imagine a Developer wanting a reference manual showing "navigation" menu programming controls without also at least explaining what the "navigation" menu is and how it functions, as well as how to modify it with built-in controls, without the need for programming unless they want to go beyond that. Also, as an "Function and Structure" Admin, I appreciate more than just changing the "navigation" menu with available tools, but also customizing it or adding programming-like items to it, as well as understanding where I may need to go if I want more, including a tease or invitation to "do it yourself" and dabble in Development.

In other words, I see no benefit to separate manuals, and I see all the benefits to having one, complete, all-inclusive Mediawiki reference manual. The challenge may be to easily make the depth of displayed information tunable so I can toggle or nicely enter / exit successive depths if I'm curious, and come back without getting lost.

Otherwise, I might as well just go to Google each time I need to look something up and let Google dynamically assemble my Mediawiki manual each day for me whenever I'm ready for more.

Does this make sense to anyone else? How could we accomplish this? Is there, or can we make, MediaWiki extensions that help structure a reference manual on a wiki - table of contents, page navigation controls back and forth with bookmarks to return to the same page and post it notes to highlight our discoveries, and an encyclopedic index to help us look up definitions, not just search-results listing every time the word is used? I look at Special:Version and I see no "book" publishing extensions here yet. Why is that? peterblaise 15:33, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

--

References in print:

• "MediaWiki Administrators’ Tutorial Guide"

Mizanur Rahman, Packt Publishing 2007

http://www.packtpub.com/Mediawiki/

• "Wikis for Dummies"

Dan Woods, Peter Thoeny, Wiley Publishing 2007

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470043997.html

• "Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools"

M. Katherine Brown, Brenda Huettner, Char James-Tanny, Wordware Publishing 2007

http://www.wordware.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=1598220284

Not yet released (as of 2007-09-21):

• "Professional Wikis"

Mark S. Choate, Wiley Publishing 2007

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470126906.html

• "WikiPatterns"

Stewart Mader, Wiley Publishing 2007

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470223626.html

• more: http://books.google.com/books?q=wiki&btnG=Search+Books

Web references:

• http://www.mwusers.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=4
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Administration
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
• http://mywiki.ncsa.uiuc.edu/wiki/MediaWiki_Servers
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:System_administration

... and so on.

This is exactly how we should be dividing these books up. The other consideration is whether the book is written to be specific to Wikibooks, MediaWiki wikis in general, Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects in general etc. I've left some comments on various talk pages in this set of texts about some small-scale re-organization, but more is needed. I have some notes written down - I'll perhaps put them up somewhere to better coordinate things.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 01:48, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Deleting a User

Hello...
Can anybody tell me please, how i can DELETE an allready registered User?

Thanx for your help
89.166.146.220 (talk) 10:56, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

You can't. The technical reason behind this is that then revisions attributed to that user would break. You can use an extension to re-attribute changes to a new user, though.

You actually can, but it's a very bad idea. mw:Extension:RenameUser is a safer alternative. You can try mw:Extension:DeleteAndMerge if you're adventurous.  — Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 01:46, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Header "3"

Hello! Do you know why there is a ===Contents=== instead of ==Contents==? Is this a typo? --Valerio Bozzolan (discuss • contribs) 08:23, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

@Valerio Bozzolan: As an alternative to the typo theory, it may have been someon's stylistic preference. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:40, 23 February 2020 (UTC)