[WikiEN-l] Re: Question about MediaWiki namespace

Tue Jan 6 03:56:40 UTC 2004

Timwi wrote:
> 
> Hi.
> 
> I understand that we now have the MediaWiki namespace and that we can 
> insert the contents of MediaWiki:XYZ into an article by inserting either 
> {{subst:XYZ}} or {{msg:XYZ}} (and yes, I know their difference).
> 
> Are there any plans to start using this functionality wide-spreadedly?
> 
> For example, all the articles on Greek letters have a list of links to 
> all the other Greek letters at the bottom. I had recently moved some of 
> the pages (e.g. [[Omega (letter)]] to [[Omega]]), and so I had to modify 
> all of the articles correspondingly. Then I had to change them all 
> *again* because I forgot one of them.
> 

There is a known bug with MSG in that changing the links in a message
will break the link table of the articles which include it. So in your
example, the "what links here" for [[Omega (letter)]] would have listed
all the greek letter articles, despite the fact that they were all
updated to point to [[Omega]] instead.

If such a change needs to be made, the link table can be refreshed by 
making some trivial change to each of the affected articles.

The moral to this story is: don't change messages unless you really need 
to. And don't use MSG in places where you're expecting changes to the links.

-- Tim Starling