Working With MediaWiki

user permissions in the next chapter.) You can give this permission to other user groups, although having this exact line is the easiest approach.
    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) "Show/hide 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 3.5 shows the interface for one revision, and Figure 3.6 shows it for more than one.
    Figure 3.5 “Show/hide selected revisions” interface for one revision
    Figure 3.6 “Show/hide selected revisions” interface for more than one revision
    As you can see, in either case, there are three things that can be hidden: the text of the revision (the most important of the three), the revision summary, and the user who made the revision. Once a revision is hidden, neither administrators nor other users will be able to see the hidden elements of that revision; though they’ll still be able to see that the revision happened. If all three of the above elements are hidden, here’s how that row in the page history will look:

    The most recent revision cannot be hidden; the inclusion of a checkbox on that row appears to just be a mistake in MediaWiki. Once elements of a revision are hidden, that same interface can be used to unhide any of them. Because this feature is so useful, we recommend enabling it for any wiki, public or private.

Moving pages
    Moving a page, in MediaWiki parlance, just means renaming it. The ability to move a page is set by the ’move’ permission, which by default is open to everyone in the ’users’ group, i.e. all logged-in users.
    To move a page, click on the tab or dropdown action labeled “Move”. You will then see an interface like this one:

    You can choose to either have a redirect from the old page, or not; it’s recommended to have one, so that links to the old page name will still work. If there are no links, though, then it doesn’t matter.
    Moving a page to a title that already exists is effectively the same as deleting the other page; that’s why only people with the ’delete’ permission, usually administrators, are allowed to do it.
    If you have a large batch of pages that all need to be renamed in the same way, the Replace Text extension ( see here ) may be helpful.

Edit conflicts
    Edit conflicts are less common than people who don’t edit wikis may think, but they do happen. An edit conflict occurs when person A saves a page while person B is still in the middle of editing that same page. When person B goes to save the page, MediaWiki will prevent the save from happening. Instead, Person B will get an error message indicating that there was an edit conflict, and they will see an interface showing both their version of the page and the latest version. At that point the user will have to manually merge their changes into the latest version.
    Edit conflicts are another reason why it’s a good idea to edit a section of the page, instead of the entire page — if you edit one section, and it’s not the section where someone else made their change, then there’s a good chance that your edit can go through without a conflict.

4  MediaWiki syntax
    MediaWiki provides its own syntax, known as “wikitext”, for doing standard formatting like section headers, links and tables. It’s intended as a simpler alternative to HTML, and one that allows more standardization of display. MediaWiki syntax has caused a lot of angst, especially for new users, but it’s not all that difficult once you understand the basic rules. And with the addition of templates, parser functions and the like, MediaWiki gains the ability to have almost unlimited customization of the page content.

Wikitext
    MediaWiki allows some HTML within wiki pages, but for the most part all formatting is done using a syntax called “wikitext”. Despite its generic name, “wikitext” refers specifically to MediaWiki’s markup language; other wiki engines’ syntax have their own names. Let’s go through the elements of wikitext.
Newlines
    First, newlines: a single newline