Wikipedia:PHP script new features

This is an incomplete list of the features the new wikipedia software has to offer. See also Wikipedia:Bug reports for "features" that shouldn't be in the script. Some additional features, added in July 2002, are listed in Software Phase III.

• User settings See your user settings page if you are logged in.
  • Side bar A bar on the left or right of the screen with useful system functions.
  • Skins Different ways to present the site. Check out the promising "Cologne Blue".
  • Minor edit presentation You can choose whether you want to see minor edits on the RecentChanges page.
• Special Functions Accessible from the "Special Pages" link on every page, or from the side bar if that has been switched on.
  • File upload feature allows users to upload graphics or sound files, see special:Upload. Uploaded files are listed on RecentChanges and they are also logged on log:Uploads.
  • Watchlist Every page has a link "Watch this article for me". Use special:Watchlist to track changes on the articles you declared an interest in; watched articles are also bolded in the Recent changes list .
  • Various Lists of new pages, of "orphaned" pages which no other page links to, of pages which are linked to but don't yet exist, of long and short pages, of the pages with the highest number of page-views, of user pages, and other statistics.
• Namespaces Separated from the page name with a colon. This very page is within the wikipedia namespace.
  • Normal namespaces Currently, there are the "blank" namespace (for normal articles), wikipedia (for articles about Wikipedia), user (for user pages), special (for system pages like RecentChanges). This keeps user pages from interfering with article content.
  • Talk namespaces All namespaces have their own Talk namespace ("Talk", "Wikipedia talk", "User talk"), to use instead of a /Talk page. A "discuss this page" link will appear in the sidebar and at the bottom of the screen on each page; "view this article" links take you back from the talk page to the main page.
• Other stuff
  • Automatic signature Just type three times ~ when you edit, and on saving the page, it will be replaced with your user name and a link to your user page. If you use four tildes, the current date will be added as well. Mainly intended for Talk pages.
  • Word-extension linking If you include a link of the form [[war]]s, or [[war]]time, the system will automatically display it as if you had typed [[war|wars]] or [[war|wartime]], respectively, saving some typing.
  • Parenthetical hiding If you include a link of the form [[kernel (mathematics)|]], the parenthetical portion will be hidden in the link: kernel. This is useful for disambiguating different meanings of a word without making linking too difficult or cluttering up the text of articles. This also works with cropping out namespaces when you want a cleaner-looking link: [[Wikipedia:copyrights|]] becomes copyrights
  • User contributions At the top of each user page, there is a link to display a list of all articles the user has worked on, according to the database.
  • Counter on every page (see bottom) for the number of times the page has been viewed.
  • Search Searches are now always based on the most current version of all articles. Boolean search ("and", "or", "not") is possible. By default, "and" is used, meaning that only articles matching all the search terms are returned. Search terms shorter than three letters always cause the search to fail and should be avoided. See wikipedia:Searching for details.
  • Interlanguage links: handy method for linking articles between the versions of Wikipedia in various languages.
  • Side-by-side diffs - the diffs are shown side-by-side, and changes portions of lines are highlighted, making it much easier to see what's what. Additionally, a diff is shown during an edit conflict so you can see exactly what you need to reintegrate.
• No longer supported
  • Subpages A page with a slash (/) in its title is treated like any other page; there are no special subpage features anymore.
  • CamelCase By using a word with MixedCase, you don't automatically create a link anymore.