Consumer Rights Wiki:Jargon buster

Wikis, especially MediaWiki wikis, have been hanging around the internet for a few decades at this point, and for those of us who are waist-deep in this or other wikis, it can often be hard to remember what it was like to not know the lingo! This page should therefore act as a cheat-sheet for the definitions of wiki-specific terminology, along with the occasional tip to help out when editing.

Any references to UI elements here will be referring to the desktop version of the site.

The Consumer Rights Wiki isn't particularly unique or special in its formatting and usage, so most of the information below can be applied to pretty much any MediaWiki. With that being said, why don't we start off by defining...

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is the software that the Wiki runs on. It is developed by the Wikimedia Foundation (who, among other things, provide the infrastructure to run Wikipedia) and is open-source, available for anyone who wants to run a Wiki to use. It's also a few decades old, and has frequently been described as 'a bit of a nightmare' to work with, but in general, it's good at what it does.

Namespaces

The pages on this Wiki are organised into namespaces. Namespaces can be most easily identified by the prefix that goes before a page title, after the '/w/' in the URL. For example, this page is in the 'Consumer_Rights_Wiki:' namespace.

What namespace a page is in can affect several things about a page, such as whether it is searchable, who can edit it, or whether it is useable as a template.

Mainspace

'Mainspace' is the default location for articles, which have no prefix. Mainspace pages are expected to contain the reader-facing content pages of the wiki.

Example page: John Deere

Talk

'Talk', or 'discussion' pages have a prefix ending in the word 'talk'. A talk namespace exists for every other namespace, to hold the discussion pages that accompany articles. Anyone can edit these, and editing is typically done via the 'add topic' or 'add reply' buttons, which make the process of starting or continuing conversations a bit easier.

You can also directly edit talk pages via the source editor, but this should only ever be done to quickly correct your own minor typos - substantive edits to talk page comments are strongly discouraged and will probably be reverted, as it disrupts people's ability to properly follow the conversation.

Busy talk pages are sometimes cleared out and placed into archives, so check for those if a conversation seems to have disappeared!

Example page: Talk:John Deere

Userspace

Userspace is the term for articles that begin with 'User:[Username]'. These articles are attributed to the specific user, and users should refrain from editing the user pages of other users, except to remove material which is obviously unsuitable for hosting on the Wiki.

User pages, and user sub-pages (beginning with 'User:[Username]/'), are a good place for users to post their Original Research, or write more opinionated or tangential content which is not suitable for mainspace wiki articles. Many editors also keep a personal sandbox at a sub-page like 'User:[Username]/sandbox' for drafting articles or testing wikitext before publishing it to mainspace.

Example page: User:Keith

Special pages

On the left-hand toolbar, there is a link called 'special pages'. This link takes you to a big long list of different pages in the 'Special:' namespace, which are built-in to MediaWiki and let you see all sorts of interesting and useful things, like a list of 'orphaned pages' (pages that are not linked to by any other page), or the full feed of recent changes.

Example page: Special:RecentChanges

Templates

Templates (page segments/sections which can be re-used on multiple pages) live in the 'Template:' namespace.

Example page: Template:StubNotice

Page tabs

Whenever you go to an article, you'll see a number of tabs along the top of the article, just below its title. These let you switch between different views and actions on the current page - reading it, editing it, viewing its history, and so on. We'll expand more on some of these (the editing ones) later, but for now, here's a quick overview, from left to right:

'Page' and 'Discussion'

The 'Page' and 'Discussion' tabs on the top left of an article allow you to move between the mainspace article and its associated talk page ('talk page' and 'discussion page' are used interchangeably). The Discussion page, also known as a 'talk' page, acts like a mini-forum for each individual article. You can start threads and reply to comments, with the comment being replied to being identifiable by its indentation.

All the tabs/buttons on the right-hand side will apply to the version of the page you're currently on, so if you click 'Discussion' and then 'View history', for example, you would be viewing the history of the discussion page, whereas if you clicked 'Page', followed by 'View history', you would be looking at the history of edits to the main page.

'Read'

The 'Read' tab does what it says on the tin, and lets you read the page.

Visual editor ('Edit')

The visual editor is the default method for editing articles, and you can access it by clicking 'Edit' in the top-right of an article. It is a text editor designed specifically for editing wiki pages, and comes built-in with MediaWiki-specific tools.

Source editor ('Edit source')

The source editor can be accessed by clicking on the 'Edit source' tab, and allows you to directly change the page's source wikitext.

The source editor is most useful when making complex changes involving templates, or when trying to debug any weirdness with the way the page displays. A decent proportion of the Wiki's power-users, though, end up using the source editor as their default for all editing.

One final note on source editing is that, while the use of AI to write content can be an absolute nightmare and cause all sorts of problems (see the AI usage policy), LLMs have a very good understanding of Wikitext syntax, and can be extremely helpful when it comes to syntax, templates, and formatting. If you're having trouble getting something to display correctly, passing the source wikitext to an LLM might give you a leg up in working out the problem.

'View history'

Clicking the 'View history' tab will take you to that page's edit history. Here you can see all of the past versions of the page, who made the edits, and any edit notes (edit summaries) the author left.

A diff is a side-by-side comparison of two versions of a page, showing exactly what was added, removed, or changed between them. The 'Compare selected revisions' button on the history page allows you to see the diff between the article at two points in time - particularly useful if an editor has made a long sequence of minor edits to the article, and you want to view the cumulative effects of those changes. The 'undo' link next to a revision lets you reverse a specific edit, and 'rollback' (available to moderators) reverts all recent consecutive edits by a single user in one click.

'Move'

The 'Move' tab (on the right-hand side, in the 'tools' dropdown) lets you rename a page. Moving a page automatically leaves a redirect behind from the old title to the new one, so existing links don't break. Page moves are logged just like edits, and bad moves can be reverted.

Wikitext

Wikitext is the 'source code' of every article on a MediaWiki wiki. It follows similar rules to markdown, with some differences - for example, bullet points are created with an asterisk, rather than a hyphen. Full documentation on Wikitext can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext

Editing

Editing is how you make changes to the wiki. Anyone can do it!

Everything discussed with source text provided here can also be done via the visual editor, using options from the drop-down menus at the top of the editor, which automatically create the source text for the article based on what is input. Trying to enter source text into the visual editor will typically not work, though sometimes it will surface a dialogue which tries to guess at what you were trying to do.

Whenever you save an edit, you'll see an 'edit summary' box. Leaving a short note (e.g. "fixed typos in Background section", or "added citation for FTC suit") helps other editors quickly understand what changed when scanning the page history, and is considered good wiki etiquette.

Citations and references

Citations and references are the bread and butter of mainspace articles on the wiki. We rely on them to make our articles verifiable - which is the idea that a reader of one of our articles can check where we're getting our info from, and make sure we're not talking rubbish. Technically speaking the citation is the inline marker in the body of the article, and the reference is the full source entry that appears in the references list at the bottom of the page, but the terms are often used interchangeably.

The vast majority of citations in the wiki will use the 'Cite web' template, which has been borrowed from Wikipedia, as we don't tend to be citing books or academic journals as much as Wikipedia does. If for some reason you need another type of citation, you may have to create or port over the necessary template yourself, if we don't have it set up yet.

Internal links

Internal links are simple to create in the source editor: you simply place double square brackets around the title of a page. If you want the display text to be different from the destination page name, you can put a pipe character (|) between the page name and the display text.

Spaces ( ) and underscores (_) are interchangeable in page names when linking them.

For example, [[Mark_Zuckerberg|bellend]] (Displayed as: bellend) will allow you to link Mark Zuckerberg's page in an accurate, if non-specific, way. This would, however, be deeply inappropriate in a normal article, as the wiki is not generally meant to offer or imply opinions on the morality of individuals or companies, and certainly not by calling anyone a bellend.

You can also link to a specific section within a page by appending '#' and the section heading, e.g. [[John Deere#Background]]. This works for section anchors on other pages, on the same page, and even on Wikipedia links (see below).

Wikipedia links are a subset of internal links. Because MediaWiki is built with Wikipedia integration in mind, you can create a link to a Wikipedia article simply by putting double square brackets around a Wikipedia page name with 'Wikipedia:' before it. For example, [[Wikipedia:False advertising]] creates a link that looks like this: Wikipedia:False advertising

External links

Generally, one should avoid creating external links in articles when not necessary, as the bulk of the external referencing should use citations rather than direct links. When an external website is being used to support a claim being made within the text of an article, direct external links should not be used. You can, however, use them in the 'External links' section of an article, or to link a company website in their Cargo table/infobox. External links are created by placing square brackets around a URL. The alternate display text will be anything after a space ( ).

For example, [https://consumerrights.wiki The Consumer Rights Wiki] will display as The Consumer Rights Wiki, whereas [https://consumerrights.wiki] with no alternate display text will display as a numbered link: [1].

Common templates

Templates are ways of re-using complex elements (such as an infobox) between articles. Here are a few of the templates you'll be likely to encounter frequently when editing:

Cargo tables

Cargo tables are how the Wiki stores structured, machine-readable data about its articles — things like a company's founding year, industry, and website, or an incident's affected product and current status. This is the data that populates the infobox you see at the top of articles like John Deere, and the same data is also consumed by external projects such as the Consumer Rights Wiki browser extension, as well as anyone wanting hard data on the Wiki's contents.

Which Cargo template a given article uses is determined by its article type. The main ones you'll see are:

Template:CompanyCargo for company articles
Template:ProductCargo for product and product-line articles
Template:IncidentCargo for incident articles

If you start a new article via the 'Create a page' link in the sidebar, the Cargo table is filled out for you based on your answers to the form. Otherwise, you'll see syntax like the following near the top of the source:

{{CompanyCargo|Founded=...|Industry=...|Website=...|Description=...}}

Each parameter after the pipe (|) is a field-value pair. To update the data, just edit the relevant value; to leave a field blank, omit it entirely.

A lot of older articles on the wiki were written before the Cargo system was introduced, and so are missing some or all of their structured data.

Placeholder templates

When a new article is created, it comes with a number of placeholder templates which describe the intended contents of the different sections of an article. The text inside them is only visible in the visual editor, or when previewing an edit.

Once you've read them, feel free to delete them!

Article notices

Article notices sit at the top of articles, and indicate to both readers and editors that a certain aspect of an article is not up to the wiki's standards, in one way or another. Certain article notices, such as ones concerning verification or tone, can only be removed by moderators or Superconfirmed users.

Citation needed

If a statement has been made in an article, but is not supported by a citation, you can place the {{CitationNeeded}} template at the end of the statement to indicate to both the reader and to other editors that the statement has not been properly justified. The rendered template displays inline as^{[citation needed]}.

Redirects

Redirect pages are special pages that exist in mainspace, but serve only to redirect the user to another page. They're useful for alternate spellings, abbreviations, and former names of articles.

Their only contents are a single line reading #REDIRECT [[Target page name]].

It is bad practice to have one redirect pointing to another (this is a 'double redirect'), and if you leave too many lying around, User:AnotherConsumerRightsPerson might shout at you!

Transclusion

Transclusion is the wiki term for embedding the contents of one page inside another. Templates are the most common form of transclusion - when you write {{CitationNeeded}} in an article, MediaWiki pulls in the contents of Template:CitationNeeded and renders it in place. The Main Page also transcludes several other pages (like the 'In the news' template) so that updating one page propagates to the other.

If you ever wonder where a piece of an article actually lives when you can't find it in the source wikitext, transclusion is usually the culprit. Look for a {{ExampleTemplate}} tag and edit the underlying template instead.

Watchlist

Your watchlist is a personal list of pages you want to keep an eye on. Clicking the star icon next to any page's title adds it to your watchlist, and 'Special:Watchlist' will then show you a feed of any edits made to those pages. Handy for keeping tabs on articles you've contributed heavily to, or talk page discussions you're involved in.

Consensus

'Consensus' is a term you might find bandied around when discussing changes to wiki policy, or when people are trying to judge whether a page fits within the CRW's guidelines. The general rule on Wikis such as this one is that such issues are decided by reaching editor consensus, usually on a relevant talk page. Consensus is reached when a significant majority of experienced contributors discussing an issue agree on what should be done. Users with higher permission levels do not have any innate ability to override the editorial decisions of others, though as active users their opinions will often be given significant weight.

User rights

Here's a quick overview of the important roles, see the moderator applications page for more info on specifics.

New user

When you first join the Wiki, or edit anonymously, you have no rights. In this state, you might encounter anti-spam blocks fairly regularly, as we have to have fairly aggressive filters to combat the fact that there are automated bot farms that target wikis to spam fake articles and SEO links.

Typically, new users are manually granted Confirmed status fairly quickly after their first few edits.

Confirmed

This is the 'normal user' tier, and the vast majority of the wiki will be editable at this permission level. Pages in the Consumer_Rights_Wiki namespace, or the Main Page, are not editable to users with this permission level. They also cannot directly delete articles, or remove certain article notices.

Superconfirmed

Superconfirmed users have the ability to edit any page on the wiki, delete and undelete pages, and remove article notices. They do not have account management permissions (i.e. they cannot promote or ban users) or page protection permissions.

Moderator

Moderators have all Superconfirmed permissions, plus the ability to confirm or block users and IPs, and to protect pages.