Wikia - creating communities

[edit] Updates

Wow, what a week in wikis. I go from a huge project at EQ2 to getting asked to help do a huge project at FFXI. It was a huge ordeal, moving a ton of pages to a new naming scheme, changing links, and cleaning up the mess. Lots of bots died in the process, but it was a change for the good (and I learned a bunch of new tricks I can use in the future). I'll do an article someday about wiki bots, but not today. Today's topic is something alot less confusing, but just as powerful...

[edit] Special pages!

"Special" pages are... um... special? They aren't wiki "content" pages so you cant edit them directly. They are actual coded files on the server. They mostly exist to give you information about the system, but most have some form of input, if even only parameters to limit their output.

I'm going to cover the basics this week. Next time, I'll get into some specific uses. And if i get a chance to do a 3rd on this topic, I'll cover some... interesting/non-standard uses for this information.

You've most likely used a few special pages before, and never knew it. The first one would be Special:Userlogin. Can you guess what it does? Another over looked one is Special:Preferences, where you can customize YOUR wiki experience. And the probably most used one is Special:Recentchanges.

The (almost) ^[1] complete list is found on every wiki at Special:Specialpages, go ahead, open it in a new tab (or window, if your still using 'old' browsing technology lol) and take a look around. Don't be afraid of looking. As long as you only look and don't click any buttons, you wont hurt anything. Infact, theres not many ways to hurt anything anyway.

The names you see there aren't always the best descriptions of what they do ^[2]. I find that mousing over the link, and seeing what the page is actually called works better.

Before you ask... no, there is no good single "help" document somewhere that explains what each one is, or how to use it, or what limits it has (or if there is, I haven't found one. got one? gimme!) Most well seasoned admins I talked to just felt their way through things, and self taught themselves what stuff is/does.

Well, I kinda lied there. There is 1 page, but it exists only because I wrote it, partially for my self, partially for my fellow admin at EQ2i, and even them, its not that great.

Its at User:Uberfuzzy/special @ eq2. Couple small notes about that page:

• some of the descriptions/notes are geared for use at eq2, so not all the comments apply to everyone.
• I haven't updated it in a while. I wrote that while eq2 was still a 1.10 version wiki, so not all the links/bugs/issues complaints are still valid

(I'm going to try to get it updated asap, and also moved to central, maybe even try to make it transcludable...)

Its useful as a guide if you don't know where to start, since you can the file "name" next the "title" side by side. Not ever page is going to as valuable of a tool as the others, in fact honestly, only a handful are useful on a daily basis, but different people have different data needs.

Well, this is starting to run long, so I'm going to wrap it up. Remember, feel free to look around at Special:Specialpages. It's not some magical admin only area, its as open as the rest of the wiki.

till next time -fzy

1. ↑ I say almost, because there are a handful of ones that aren't listed, but are very common, but don't have a use when going directly TO the page, so they aren't listed there. also, depending on your privileges at the wiki, more can show up at the bottom
2. ↑ and they can be changed by sysops using MediaWiki: messages, as I found out :(