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