Working With MediaWiki

to each sub-section of the page name in turn. So you could have a page like "Ace Motors/History/Europe/1900-1950", and, if subpages are enabled for the main namespace, the top of the page will look like:

Enabling subpages
    Subpages are enabled through the global variable $wgNamespacesWithSubpages, which by default is empty. If you want to have subpages, say, the main namespace and the template namespace, you could add the following to LocalSettings.php:
$wgNamespacesWithSubpages = array( NS_MAIN, NS_TEMPLATE );
    Conversely, if you wanted every namespace to have subpages, you would be best off calling array_fill(), like the following:
$wgNamespacesWithSubpages = array_fill( 0, 200, true );
    (In this case, 200 is an arbitrarily high number, with the assumption that there are no namespaces on this wiki with an ID greater than 200.)

6  Communication
    MediaWiki provide a variety of ways for users to communicate with one another. These include talk pages for potentially large-scale discussions, personal communication via user talk pages (and potentially via more social networking-like interfaces in the future), threaded discussions at the bottoms of pages via some extensions, real-time chat, and finally users emailing each other via the wiki. We’ll cover all of these in this chapter.

Talk pages
    As we saw in the last chapter, every regular namespace for content in MediaWiki has an associated talk namespace, meant to hold pages used to discuss the contents of pages in that regular namespace. In the interface, one of the elements that usually shows up automatically for each page is a link to that page’s corresponding talk page; in most skins this is the second tab within the top row of tabs. A page and its corresponding talk page will have the same name, but in different namespaces; for instance, the talk page for “University of Chicago” would be “Talk:University of Chicago”, while the talk page for “Category:Universities” would be “Category talk:Universities”.
    Talk pages in MediaWiki, in general, are intended only for discussion of the corresponding page and how to improve it, and not for discussion of the page’s underlying topic — that holds true for both Wikipedia and internal organizational wikis. There are two major exceptions to that, though. Talk pages for users, i.e. pages in the “User talk:” namespace (in English), are usually used for communication with that user, and only rarely to discuss the contents of the user page itself. And on wiki pages meant for documenting some technical topic, like a piece of software, the talk page can often turn into an informal venue for questions and answers about the page’s topic.
    Let’s take a look at a typical usage of a talk page. On a page on an internal wiki, you see the information that the South American division of your company was founded in 1983. This is a surprise to you, since you had always thought that the division was founded in the 1990s. Your first instinct is to simply edit the page and change the information, but then you reconsider, thinking that you’ve just been misinformed. (The real lesson of this example may be the importance of trying to reference every piece of information; see here for more on that.)
    You decide, then, to bring it to the talk page. You click on the page’s “Discussion” tab, and then among the tabs will appear one called either “Add topic” or just “+”, depending on which skin you’re using. You should click that tab. Then you’ll see a standard edit interface, but with the addition of a “Subject/headline” field at the top. In that field, you could write something like “Founded in 1983?”, and in the body, the following:
I had always thought the South American division was started in the 1990s - I think I heard that during the employee orientation. Was it really in 1983? If so, is there a source for that? ~~~~
    Then you hit “Save”, and the new section is created. The “~~~~” at the end is important — the set of four tildes gets changed, when you save the page, into a “signature”, containing your username, a link to your talk page, and the date and time the message was posted. You could also put “~~~” instead — three tildes instead of four. This will display everything but the date and time. In practice, there’s no good reason to do this; four tildes is always better.
    If you’re not logged in, your IP address will be displayed instead of a username —