Metaweb:User preferences help

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

<-MediaWiki User's Guide

This entry originally from the Wikipedia

The preferences dialog allows you to personalize some aspects of a MediaWiki wiki. They will apply only when you are logged in.

Logging in and setting preferences are done separately on each wiki. You may find it convenient to specify the same preferences on each wiki that you use, but this is not necessary.

QuickBar

This is the list of links to the various special pages. You may optionally have it appear at the right or left side of each page. There's no option yet to have it appear at the top or bottom of the page. Currently, the QuickBar must be enabled to allow you to access some features such as moving (renaming) a page. The "fixed" quickbar will appear at the top corner of the page, while the "floating" quickbar will appear at the top corner of the browser window instead of scrolling with the article text. Floating quickbars may not float correctly on old or mobile browsers.

Password

To change your password, enter your old password, the new password, and the new password a second time. (If you're merely changing the other preferences, you do not need to enter your password.)

Skins

A MediaWiki skin is a style of page display. Try them out; they are mostly cosmetic. A skin may override some of your other settings on this page; some would call this a bug rather than a feature.

Rendering math

MediaWiki allows you to enter mathematical equations as TeX code. These options let you control how that code is rendered into

• Show hoverbox over wiki links. On some browsers, putting the mouse pointer over a hyperlink can display the name of the link. This option's setting seems to have little or no control over this feature, at least with some browsers.
• Underline links. Normally, link text will be underlined. Optionally, you may request that links not be underlined, although your browser may not respect this setting. Normally links that are not underlined can still be recognized by color. However, one can then not distinguish between two consecutive words being a single link or two links, without pointing at the words with the cursor. There is some discussion of changing the default here: see Link style vote
• Format broken links like this. This option is enabled by default. Normally, links to articles which do not yet exist (like the weather in London) will appear underlined and in red. You may optionally make these appear as a trailing question mark link (something like this?). This makes them stand out less, but it's kind of confusing to some people (it may be interpreted as indicating that the information is uncertain).
• Justify paragraphs. You may choose to have paragraphs displayed with full justification.
• Hide minor edits in recent changes. Registered users may choose to mark edits as being minor (meaning fixes too trivial for trusting users to check up on). It applies to Recent changes and Enhanced Recent Changes, but not to the Watchlist. It also affects Related changes, but currently in an odd way: if the last edit of a page linking to the current page was minor, than neither that nor the last major change is shown.
• Enhanced recent changes (not for all browsers). Group recent changes per day by article, display the titles of the changed articles in order from new to old latest change, or in the case of hiding minor edits, latest major change (send ideas for improvement to Magnus Manske, the author of this feature).
• Auto-number headings. This adds hierarchical outline-style numbering to headers in articles.
• Show edit box toolbar. In compatible browsers, a toolbar with editing buttons can be displayed. See MediaWiki User's Guide: Editing toolbar.
• Edit pages on double click. If this box is checked, you can double-click on a page to edit it. This option requires section editing via [edit] links
• Enable section editing by right clicking on section titles (JavaScript)

• **Show

  • Textbox dimensions. Here you can set up your preferred dimensions for the textbox used for editing page text.
  • Time diff. This is the number of hours to be added or subtracted from Hawaii
  • -9 Juneau
  • -8 (DST -7) California (Pacific Standard Time)
  • -7 (DST -6) Arizona (Mountain Standard Time)
  • -6 (DST -5) Central America, Saskatchewan (Central Standard Time)
  • -5 (DST -4) New York, Toronto (Eastern Standard Time)
  • -4 (DST -3) Canada's Maritime provinces (except those mentioned otherwise)
  • -3 (DST -2) Newfoundland, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Greenland
  • -2 (DST -1) Mid-Atlantic
  • -1 (DST 0) Azores, Cape Verde Islands
  • 0 (DST 1) United Kingdom, Casablanca, Monrovia
  • 1 (DST 2) most of Europe, West Central Africa
  • 2 Bucharest, Cairo, Pretoria, Scandinavia, Jerusalem
  • 3 Moscow, Kuwait, Baghdad, Tehran, Nairobi
  • 4 Abu Dhabi, Baku
  • 4.5 Kabul
  • 5 Islamabad
  • 5.5 India
  • 6 Sri Lanka, etc.
  • 6.5 Rangoon
  • 7 Bangkok, Hanoi
  • 8 PRC, Taiwan, Perth, Ulaan Bataar, Singapore
  • 9 Japan, Seoul
  • 10 most of Australia, Guam, Vladivostok
  • 11 Magadan, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia
  • 12 Pago Pago, Auckland, New Zealand**

The time is displayed in local time, according to the set preferences, in: * Recent changes * Related changes * Page history, Image history * User contributions * New pages * "This page was last modified" at the bottom of pages * Special:Imagelist

The UTC time is applicable: * In the signing of Talk pages * In the Upload log * In referring to non-localized events, including things that happen on the wiki.

Keep this in mind when copying an excerpt from Recent Changes, a revision history listing, etc. to a Talk page. Convert manually to UTC or temporarily set the preferences to a zero offset before producing the revision history etc. to be copied.

E-mail, search, etc.

• Your e-mail: You may optionally register your e-mail address (it will not be shown publicly on the site). This will enable you to reset your password by clicking the "Mail me a new password" box on the log in screen, if you forget it. Additionally, it will enable other registered users to send e-mail to you from the "E-mail this user" link on your user page unless you've checked the disable box (see below).
• Disable e-mail from other users: If you check this, users will not be able to send you e-mail by way of the "E-mail this user" feature.
• Your nickname: You may optionally specify a nickname that is different from your username when you enter your signature with ~~~ or ~~~~. You can get a bit more fancy by keeping in mind that the software enters [[User:Name| in front and ]] in the back of your signature. So entering ]] | [[User talk:Name|Talk as your signature will also include a link to your talk page.
• Number of titles on recent changes: You may select the number of changes which will be shown by default on the Recent Changes and Watchlist page. Once on those pages, links are provided for other options.
• Threshold for stub display: Links to articles with fewer characters than the amount you may specify here (e.g. 500, 1000, etc.) will be displayed in a different color. Helpful for identifying stubs.
• Hits to show per page: You may choose the number of results returned on each page of search results.
• Lines to show per hit is somewhat cryptic; specifying a number n means: "do not show any context if the search term occurs beyond line n in the page"; here a paragraph, as well as the blank line between two paragrahs, each count as one "line"; line breaks in the source, even when not affecting the lay-out of the page (and even when not directly visible in the edit box of the article), affect the line count. Setting the parameter to 5000 or more gives context for every occurrence.
• Characters of context per line: the number of characters of context per occurrence; however, the context is anyway restricted to the "line" (see above) it occurs in. To get the whole line, put a large number like 5000.

Notes

You cannot change your username. If for some reason you feel unbearably compelled to change it, create a new username and mark the old one for deletion.

You cannot indicate personal information (such as your real name) here, but you may do so on a page named after your username in the User: namespace. (That's available as a link on the line which says "You are logged in as user WhatsYourName" above the preferences panel. Feel free to start your own page with anything you want to say about yourself on it.)

Browser preferences

Browsers usually also allow you to specify preferences, e.g. font size and font type. The standard skin is compatible with your browser setting of font size and font type. The Cologne Blue skin has most text in a fixed font size, ignoring your browser setting. Some browsers, e.g. IE, allow you to specify that font size specified in the web page is ignored. In that case the font size in Cologne Blue is as specified in the browser, but with the line height not adjusted accordingly. Therefore a large font gives a messy result.

The font size in the edit box is independent of the font size of the other text, and it does not seem to be adjustable at all, except by choosing the screen resolution.

Specifying that the colors specified in the web page are ignored is not recommended, because they are useful in the diff