Revision as of 23:19, 15 February 2009

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The quickest way to find information in MediaWiki is to look it up directly. On the left-hand side of your screen there is a search box with two buttons under it labeled "Go" and "Search".

If you clicked “Search”, or you clicked “Go” and the page you were looking for did not exist, you will be presented with a list of articles that matched your search criteria (or a message that no matches were found).

How it works

Here's how the search works:

• Only the article content is searched - the page title is ignored.
• The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click “edit”, not the rendered page. This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be.
• Even if you enclose a phrase in quotes, the search looks for each word individually. e.g., if you enter "world war 2" it will return pages that contain "world" and "war" and "2".
• The search is not case-sensitive, so "MediaWiki", "mediawiki" and "MEDIAWIKI" all give the same result.

Restricting the search

If you click the “Search” button without filling in anything, you will be taken to “Special:Search” which gives you extra searching options (also available from any search results list)

You may find it useful to restrict a search to pages within a particular namespace e.g., only search within the User pages. Tick the namespaces you require for this search.

By default only the namespaces specified in your preferences will be searched. Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default. This can be done by selecting and deselecting boxes in the ”search” section of user preferences.

Template

Syntax

{{Languages|PageName}}

• PageName (optional) - the name of the page to display language links for. If omitted then the English version of the current page is used. This parameter can normally be omitted, as it is only required if you want to link to a page other than the one you place the template on, which is very uncommon. If this parameter is used on a sub-page make sure you supply the root name, not the full page name (e.g. on MediaWiki/fr you would need to use {{Languages|MediaWiki}} and not {{Languages|MediaWiki/fr}}).

Usage

The template should only be placed on pages that exist in more than one language, and it should be placed in the same location on each translation of the page.

The English version of a page is always the main version, with all other languages as sub-pages, named using the appropriate language code (see below).

For example, on the Main Page you would include the text {{Languages}}, both on Main Page itself, and on each of its language sub-pages. The template automatically creates links to any language sub-pages that exist, e.g. Main Page/ja<tt>, <tt>Main Page/fr, and ignores non-existant languages.

See Project:Language policy for further details about translating pages.

Supported languages

This shows you the name of each language's sub-page (using Main Page as an example). Other languages may be added easily as necessary. Please use the appropriate prefix, as used on Wikipedia when adding a new language. Please do not add languages for which no pages exist yet, as this will increase the time needed to include the template without adding any benefit (languages are only displayed to the user when the relevant page exists).

The link on the language names goes to the Wikipedia in that language. If no Wikipedia in your language exists, do not add pages in that language to MediaWiki.org! This wiki is not the place for language advocacy - please go through the correct channels, and once your language has a Wikipedia then please return to add content here.

Example

Here is how the language bar looks on the MediaWiki page: Template loop detected: Template:Languages