mediawiki-customization

MediaWiki customization

by Tantek

The MediaWiki installation at microformats.org/wiki has been customized in a number of ways.

This page documents some of these customizations for informative purposes. This is not thorough nor comprehensive documentation.

Customizations

• enable lowercase page names
• enabled hyphenated phrases for page names
• hide MediaWiki "Talk" links

Goals and motivations

I'm responsible for pushing for nearly all of the specific MediaWiki customizations on the microformats wiki and thus I figured I should capture at least some of the reasoning in the hopes that perhaps others may find it useful.

• lowercase URLs are better. MediaWiki has an annoying tendency of capitalizing article titles, which, though may be stylistically proper (in the English writing style meaning of stylistic) for proper nouns, is incorrect for common terms (which a lot of microformats pages are). Oh and the whole "The initial capital letter is due to technical restrictions." nonsense on Wikipedia is ridiculous. It's software. Just fix it. More:
  • all same case is easier to read (citation required)
  • all lowercase is easier to read than all uppercase (citation required)
  • all lowercase is easier to type
• hyphenated phrases are better indexed (SEO) than CamelCased phrases.
  • more importantly, hyphenated phrases are easier to read (for humans, duh) than CamelCased phrases
• Talk pages are lame and "one more inbox to check". Talk pages are lame (e.g. the structure/threading is poor) and we don't need yet another discussion area (in addition to IRC, mailing-lists) Eliminating them from the default user interface was the simplest way to effectively eliminate their usage. Invisible talk pages = nearly no one uses them. And one fewer link cluttering the default UI is always nice. .

How to

Documentation on how to modify a MediaWiki install to get these customizations.

to-do: To be filled in. ;)