Manual:Special pages

Special pages are an important tool for wiki maintainers to track changes in the wiki and to analyze important information about all wiki pages.

Characteristics of special pages

• Their main purpose is:
  • to track changes
  • to view statistics and logs
  • to provide bulk editing tools for administrators, (e.g. , global find/replace, import/export pages)
  • to detect problems (e.g., broken redirects, uncategorized pages)

• They cannot be created or edited by any user
• They are listed on the page Special:Special Pages
• Some pages are only shown to users with admin rights
• They have their own (pseudo-)namespace Special
• Users with admin rights see more special pages than other users

Accessing special pages

To access a list of all Special pages, click Special pages in the Global actions menu or navigate directly to the Special: Special Pages page. Some frequently used special pages are also linked directly from the Global Actions menu.

It is not possible to create a redirect page that links to a special page.

Useful special pages

Numerous special pages for administrators and wiki maintainers are available. Take some time to click through them and see which ones are useful to you. The overview page also contains all special pages provided by BlueSpice.

If you want to use some specific pages frequently and they are not already listed in your wiki's navigation, you can create links to these pages in your user menu.

Maintenance lists

• Wanted pages/ Wanted files / Wanted templates: Pages and files that are linked or used on wiki pages, but that don't exist.
• Dead-end pages: Pages that do not link to other pages.
• Orphaned Pages: Pages that are not linked from or transcluded into other pages.
• Uncategorized Pages: Pages that do not belong to any category.
• Short Pages: Pages with little or no content.
• Broken Redirects: Redirects to non-existent pages.

Lists of pages

• All pages: All pages of the wiki are listed here. The default view shows all pages in the main namesapce. You can switch to any namespace by selecting it from the namespace drop-down menu and then clicking go. If your wiki administrators have set up namespaces that are only used in your wiki, they will be listed at the end of the menu selection.
• Categories: All categories that exist in your wiki. If they are shown in red, they are used as tags on pages, but don't have their own wiki page yet.
• List of redirects: Shows all redirected pages and their target pages.

Users and rights

Active users list: Shows the users who have performed an activity in the last 30 days.

User rights: Shows what user groups a user belongs to.

Recent changes and logs

• Logs: Shows all logs such as the deletion log or the move log) (only available to users with admin rights). An individual log can be picked from the drop down menu.
• Recent changes: Lists changes that have occurred recently. Users can save multiple filters to see different views of the change log.

Data and tools

• Popular pages: Lists the pages with the most page views.
• System messages: Lists system messages available in the MediaWiki namespace. They can be customized by administrators to override default messages.
• Replace text: Allows a global search and replace option for the wiki (admins only).

Redirecting special pages

• Random page: Takes you to a randomly selected page of the wiki.
• Random redirect: Takes you to a randomly selected redirected page of the wiki.

High use pages

• Most used categories: Displays the categories with the most member pages (with number of members).
• Most linked-to pages: Lists pages linked to most frequently (with number of links).

Page tools

• Export pages: Text and edit history of a specific page can be exported to another wiki using this form.
• Import pages: External wiki pages can be imported here as XML data.
• Import CSV: Allows to create new wiki pages from a csv-file.

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