Chapter 8. Special Pages
Most MediaWiki pages are articles, but some are web applications called special pages. We’ve encountered several of them:
The search results page (Searching for Articles)
A list of all articles in the wiki (Namespaces)
The login page (Logging In and Out)
Your preferences page (Preferences)
The file upload page (Uploading a File)
A list of all categories (Adding an Article to a Category)
and there are dozens of others with diverse purposes.
Special pages live in the Special namespace, and have names such as
Special:AllPages
and Special:Categories. You can jump
to a special page by entering its name in the search box, browse special
pages by clicking the Toolbox link “Special pages”, or link to them by
name (e.g., [[Special:Upload]]).
You’ll also find their links sprinkled around the wiki, such as the Move
tab for renaming articles (leading to Special:Move) and many links in the user
options and toolbox menus.
In this chapter, we’ll cover the special pages included with MediaWiki and a few others found on Wikipedia. Some special pages will be immediately useful, while others might seem obscure to all but wiki administrators. Because there are so many special pages, this book presents them in three different ways:
The following sections cover the special pages in the default order in which they appear on
Special:SpecialPages, where they are grouped by purpose.[44]Special Pages Grouped by Task presents the special pages in terms of tasks you may be trying to accomplish. ...
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