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Help:Preferences

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

Contents

QuickBar

The quickbar is the list of links to the special and maintenance pages. On some skins, you have the option to have the quickbar appear on the right or left side of the window. For these settings, the quickbar must be enabled to allow you access to certain features such as moving a page or uploading a file.

Change 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 "skin" is a style of page display in MediaWiki. The changes are mainly cosmetic and alter only the appearance, not the functionality. However, some skins may override certain other settings in your preferences (such as the quickbar) — some users consider this a bug rather than a feature.

Miscellaneous options

These options cover various other settings that control how MediaWiki renders article pages and presents editing functions.

  • 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.
  • 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, but not to the Watchlist.
  • 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.
  • Auto-number headings. This adds hierarchical outline-style numbering to headers in articles.
  • Remember password across sessions. Enabling this feature will place a HTTP cookie in your browser's cache, which will allow MediaWiki to recognize you each time you visit the page. You will not have to log in each time you visit. (This function will be nullified when you log out.)
  • Edit box has full width. If this box is checked, the edit box (when you click "Edit this page") will be the width of the browser window, minus the QuickBar width.
  • Edit pages on double click. If this box is checked, you can double-click on a page to edit it. This option requires Javascript to be enabled in your browser.
  • Enable section editing via [edit] links. When this setting is enabled, an "edit" link will appear to the right of each section header. This feature makes the editing of long articles easier.
  • Enable section editing by right clicking on section titles (JavaScript)
  • Show table of contents (for articles with more than 3 headings).
  • Watch new and modified articles. If this option is selected, any articles that you create or modify will be automatically added to your watchlist.
  • Mark all edits minor by default. This option automatically selects the "This is a minor edit" checkbox when you edit pages. (Not recommended for new contributors.)
  • Show preview before edit box and not after it. If you select this option, the preview will be displayed above the exit box when you click the "Show preview" button while editing a page.
  • Disable page caching. This turns off page caching. This is useful if you're experiencing problems of seeing outdated versions of pages, but this comes at a cost of longer loading times.

Textbox and Time

  • 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 Coordinated Universal Time to find your time zone. This time zone is used when calculating displayed page update timestamps, and may become temporarily incorrect from time to time if you observe daylight saving time — don't forget to update it to match your local time, because MediaWiki doesn't know where you are or precisely when you celebrate DST. (Also, the server's clock may be slightly offset from reality, much as the articles may be.) A scattering of typical time diff values are below. If yours isn't listed, try this list of time zones and abbreviations or add and subtract a few hours as needed.
    • -8 (DST -7) Pacific Time (North America)
    • -5 (DST -4) Eastern Time (North America)
    • -4 (DST -3) Atlantic Time (Canada's Martime provinces)
    • 0 (DST +1) Greenwich Mean Time (Western Europe)
    • +1 (DST +2) Central European Time
    • +3 Eastern European Time
    • +9 Japan
    • +10 (DST +11) Australian Eastern Time
    • +12 Pago Pago (American Samoa)
    • -9 (DST -8) Alaska Time
    • -10 (DST -9) Hawaii-Aleutian Time

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 DC Universe 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 ~~~~.
  • 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 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. Internet Explorer, 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 feature.

This text is stored on Wikia Help. Suggest changes here.

Contents

Special:Preferences, showing the first tab.

The MediaWiki software allows logged in users set some personal preferences which tailor the way they read, write and edit on Wikia to your particular style.

Preferences are carried over to all Wikia sites, so you get the preferred behaviour at every wiki you visit.

See Special:Preferences for the options page.

What are the different tabs for?

User profile

From the user profile tab, you can see:

  • Your registered username.
  • Your user ID.
  • The number of edits made across all of Wikia.

In addition, you can change various things, including:

In detail:

  • Real name: This may be used to give you attribution for your work. Other users of the wiki will not see this! It probably won't be used for anything, either, though, as most wikis will credit you by your username.
  • E-mail address: Your preferred email address. It is strongly recommended that you give an email address you use and are likely to have for a long time. If you forget your password, this is the only way you can get it sent back to you!
  • Nickname: The name you would like to have displayed when you sign posts.
    • If you leave this blank, posts will be signed with your username. (For example, if your username is "jbrown123" but you would like to sign as "Jeff", put "Jeff" in the nickname field. If you would like to sign as "jbrown123", leave it blank.)
    • There are lots of ways you can customize your signature using HTML. If you'd like to see how you can do that, see Help:Signature. The "Raw Signature" box is for those using more advanced customized signatures, which you can find out about at the signature help page.
  • Language: The language you would like the interface (buttons, system messages) to be in. This can be different from the language that the wiki is in, however, The articles will stay in whichever language they were originally written in.
  • Change password: Use these fields if you would like to change your password. "Remember across sessions" stores a cookie on your machine so that you do not have to enter your password every time. (If you use a public computer, such as a library or school lab computer, you probably don't want to do this. But if you're using your home computer that no one else uses, it can be convenient.)
  • Email: Check the box if you do not want other logged-in users to be able to contact you via email. (Normally, the "e-mail this user" link, which is on the side of the screen when you look at any user's user page, will allow users to email you without seeing your email address.)


Skin

Here you can change the "skin", or page layout and design, that you see when you are browsing Wikia sites. There are several different options available, from the classic Monobook skin used at Wikipedia, to the new Monaco skin - each provides site navigation and links in a slightly different way. You can also choose whether to see all ads as if you are a logged out user, and whether to use the locally chosen site skin.

See Help:Skins for more information.


Files

From the files tab, you can choose how to display images. Adapting the options here can improve page display if you have an especially large or small monitor or display screen.

In detail:

  • Limit images on image description pages to: allows you to choose a size that will fit on your monitor when you click on an image to see the information about it.
  • Thumbnail size: allows you to choose how big images should be when small "thumbnail" versions are put on a page. Choose a size that you like and works best with your monitor.


Date and time

On this tab, you can set time zone and date formats.

The server time (on Wikia, this is UTC) usually differs from your local time; by pressing the "Fill in from browser" button, the correct value will automatically be entered into the offset box. If the server time was 18.00 and your local time was 21.00, the offset would be 03:00 hours. Note this won't automatically adjust for any local daylight saving changes.

When you save your changes, the time in various logs and lists around the wiki will be displayed in your local time and chosen format. This does not affect signatures.

Editing

The editing tab allows you to change certain details about the editing interface or editing process, which may help to make editing smoother, more intuitive, or less error-prone for you.

See Help:Editing preferences for more details.


Recent changes

Here you can:

  • Alter the number of titles displayed in recent changes (both by days and edits - whichever comes first will be the effective limit).
  • Decide whether or not you want the list to display minor edits (do you care about every typo fix and category change?).
  • If you have JavaScript enabled, enable Enhanced Recent Changes, a method of folding multiple edits to an article into a single recent changes entry. This is popular, and recommended.


Watchlist

The watchlist tab enables you to specify what you do and do not want to see on your watchlist, one of the best methods of keeping an eye on changes to articles you care about.

"Expand watchlist to show all applicable changes" ensures that every recent edit of the page is shown, not just the last edit (similar to Enhanced Recent Changes).


Search

You can choose which namespaces to search, and how many results to return, when using Wikia's internal search function.

It also allows you to turn "Search suggest" on and off - this suggests results as you type words into the search box.

In detail:

  • Hits per page: You may choose the number of results returned on each page of search results.
  • Lines per hit: Specifying a number n means "do not show any context if the search term occurs beyond line n in the page." Setting this to 5000 or more gives context for every occurrence.
  • Context per line: The number of characters of context per occurrence; however, the context is anyway restricted to the "line" (anything without a line break; usually a paragraph) it occurs in. To get the whole line, choose a large number like 5000.
  • Search in these namespaces by default: Choose which types of pages you would like to appear in searches by default. (You will be able to change these options from the search page.) For example, selecting "Main" only will return only articles, selecting "Main" and "Talk" would search articles and their discussion pages.


Miscellaneous

A few odds and ends of Wikia behaviour can be controlled here:

  • Format broken links like this (alternative: like this?):
Using a question mark? after a link to a non-existing page is a convention used in other types of wiki software; those used to that convention have an option to use it at Wikia too.
  • Justify paragraphs: makes text line up with both left and right margins
  • Auto-number headings: adds numbers before headings
  • Show table of contents (for pages with more than 3 headings): enabled by default; you can disable all tables of contents here if they interfere with your browsing style.
  • Disable page caching: allows you to see certain page updates quicker, but puts more strain on the database servers. Don't disable unless you know you have a reason to.
  • Enable "jump to" accessibility links: provides links at top of page which can make navigation quicker and easier for screen readers and other accessibility software
  • Don't show page content below diffs: Normally a diff view will display the entire page content, including images and templates, below the side-by-side diff comparison. If you don't need that view, checking this preference will speed up the display of diff pages.

See also

Retrieved from "http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Preferences"