Manual:Parameters to index.php
This page is a partial list of the parameters to index.php , the main script of the MediaWiki software, as provided by MediaWiki itself. Most of these arguments are usually given as GET parameters in the URL, but can also be passed as POST data. POST is actually required in some cases, such as the purge action. Some extensions provide additional parameters.
Page revision or version
Parameters to index.php usually apply and have a meaning related to the page they apply to. The page (or a version of it) can be specified by typing one or more of the following parameters: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ferengi&curid=177126&diff=304901009&oldid=304764764
Name | Description |
---|---|
title | The title of the page. It can be a wiki page or a special page, depending on the other parameters. To disable a special page in your wiki configuration, you can use the SpecialPage_initList hook. |
curid | The id of the wiki page; overrides the value of title. |
Some actions (such as view and edit) also work on a particular revision of a page. Such a revision is identified by the following two parameters, allowing the omission of the title and the id of the page.
Name | Description |
---|---|
oldid | The ID of a revision |
direction | Instead of the revision given by oldid , use:
|
Actions
The following is a list of values for the action
parameter.
Some of these actions can be enabled/disabled by using a dedicated configuration setting in LocalSettings.php
. Where available, these local settings are listed.[2]
Name | Function | Example |
---|---|---|
view | View is the default action; view is the one action that is used when no action is explicitly given | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=view |
watch | Adds the page to the user's watchlist | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=watch |
unwatch | Removes the page from the user's watchlist | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=unwatch |
delete | Deletes a page
By default, delete returns a form for the user to confirm deletion and specify a reason.[3] |
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=delete |
revert | Reverts to a previous version of an image. The following two other parameters are required:
|
|
rollback | Rollbacks the last edits made by the last editor of the page; in other words, it restores the last version of the article whose editor is not the last one. The edit is marked as minor and a default edit summary is used.[4]
The following two other parameters are required:
|
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=rollback&from=John&token=d7aaa6c\ |
protect | Shows or changes the protection levels of a page:
|
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=protect |
unprotect | Same page as protect (unprotect and protect are the same page, and do the same thing). | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=unprotect |
markpatrolled | Marks an edit as patrolled; see Help:Patrolled edit .
|
|
render | Outputs the HTML rendering of the entire page content; similar to the view action, but only the unstyled article text is output, not any part of the user interface (additional toolboxes, search box, stylesheets, etc.). For more stable programmatic access or to retrieve the HTML of only a piece of page content, you should use the
parse API with page or pageid parameters. |
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=render |
purge | Clears the page's cache, forcing the page to be redisplayed from its source.
|
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=purge |
edit | Shows the editor for the page.
The editor shown depends on the user preferences. See Editor. |
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=edit |
submit | When viewed directly (HTTP GET), shows the editor, like "edit".
When viewing by submitting a form (HTTP POST), performs various actions related to changing the page (see #What to do below for more details):
|
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=submit |
editredlink | Same as edit.[6] | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=editredlink |
history | Shows the history of the page. (See history, below) | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=history |
historysubmit | When viewing the difference between revisions, after clicking "compare selected revisions" on the history page. This requires a "diff" and/or "oldid" parameter, otherwise it just shows the page itself. | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=historysubmit&diff=456290&oldid=456270 |
raw | Shows the raw content of the page. (See Raw, below) A pop up window will open up, asking whether you would like to save the page in index.php.[7] | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=raw |
ajax | (deprecated in 1.27); (removed in 1.38) If enabled, calls a php function registered via $wgAjaxExportList ; see Manual:Ajax .[8] | |
credits | Shows a list of people who contributed to the page in question using the real name specified in the user's preferences. Currently disabled on Wikimedia wikis, but is enabled by default on vanilla MediaWiki. | translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Translating:MediaWiki&action=credits |
info | Shows information about the page, such as the number of users having it in their watchlist, the number of edits, the number of authors. See the Reimplement info action RfC for context. | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&action=info |
revisiondelete | Set visibility restrictions on revision text, edit summary, and editor's username/IP address (requires deleterevision user right) |
User preference overriding
The following parameters override some of the user's preferences. Other parameters explained in other sections are "diffonly", "internaledit", and "externaledit". The below parameters affect all actions but "render" and "raw".
Name | Function | Example |
---|---|---|
useskin | Specify a skin | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?useskin=modern |
uselang | Specify a language for the UI elements (such as the "my talk" link, etc.), i.e. the user interface language; this is especially useful for creating an account, because at that stage no preference settings apply.
The special language code " |
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&type=signup&uselang=de |
variant | Specify a language variant for the UI elements (this is used for example in the Chinese Wikipedia, as the Chinese language has variants); | |
printable | (deprecated in 1.35) When set to yes , the page is shown in a form that is suitable for printing.
|
|
debug | When set to true (e.g. 1 or true ), the ResourceLoader serves non-minified JavaScript and CSS. See ResourceLoader/Features#Debug mode.
|
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&debug=true |
safemode | When enabled (e.g. set to 1 or true ), user-provided CSS and JS will not be loaded. This disables personal scripts and styles (e.g. "User:" common.js and css), and site-wide scripts and styles (e.g. "MediaWiki:Common.js" and "MediaWiki:Common.css"), and all gadgets.[9] It is possible to mark site-wide styles ("MediaWiki:Common.css") as safe via $wgAllowSiteCSSOnRestrictedPages , which permits them in safemode.
|
www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki&safemode=1 |
useskinversion | Specify a skin version[10] | www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki&useskinversion=2 |
View and render
View is the default action. If no other action is added to the URL, action=view
is used. This action shows a page, a revision, or the difference between two revisions of the same or two different pages. Below is a (partial) list.
- diff
- the value of this parameter identifies a revision; the difference between another revision and this one is returned:
- if
oldid
is not passed, the difference between this revision and the previous one on the same article is shown; - otherwise, the difference between the revision given by
oldid/direction
and this one is shown; the value of this parameter can be a revision id, the valuesprev
ornext
to identify a revision relative to the one given byoldid/direction
, and the valuecur
to identify the latest revision of the page;
- if
- Note that
oldid
anddiff
need not be two revisions of the same article, allowing two revisions of two different pages to be compared - redirect
- if the value of this parameter is 'no' and the page is a redirect, the page itself is shown and not the target of the redirect; this parameter has effect only on
action=view
andaction=render
and only if neitheroldid
nordiff
is given, as this is the only case where the target article is shown instead of the redirect; - rdfrom
- when the page is the result of following a redirect from an external wiki, this parameter tells which wiki that was, so that the "Redirected from ..." line can be shown
- diffonly
- override the user's preference on whether to render the page when a diff is requested, eg.
diffonly=yes
- search
- if non-blank (and if searches are enabled), override all other parameters and perform a search
The following parameters apply only to categories.
- from
- if the page is a category, only list entries whose sortkey are equal or follows the value of this parameter;
- Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=upload&from=20070814233520&until=20070814233625
- Links to a log of all the images uploaded on August 14, 2007 from 23:35:20 until 23:36:25
- until
- if the page is a category, only list entries whose sortkey precedes the value of this parameter; only used if
from
is not passed;
The following parameter apply only to images.
- page
- a page number in a multi-page media; it currently only applies to DjVu and PDF files; first page is numbered 1;
History
- limit
- The number of page edits to list, the maximum is 5000 edits.
- Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=13&contribs=user&target=Atlgirl052005 - lists 13 edits per page.
- dir
- the relative order of edit history pages.
- page edits are sorted in decreasing timestamp.
- offset
- uses a timestamp to specify which part of the history is displayed;
- Returns the edits which occurred before the timestamp;
- Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20090815195334&contribs=user&target=Atlgirl052005
- Shows the edits which occurred immediately before the timestamp 20090815195334 (20090815195334 is not shown).
- Parameter format is yyyymmddhhmmss. So 20090815195334 was created on August 15, 2009 [20090815] at 19:53 (UTC) and 34 seconds [195334].
- See Wikipedia:Complete diff and link guide.
- Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20090815195334&contribs=user&target=Atlgirl052005
- if
dir=prev
is added, it works the other way around, listing all edits after the timestamp[11]- Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20090815195334&dir=prev&contribs=user&target=Atlgirl052005
- Shows the edits which occurred immediately after the timestamp 20090815195334 (20090815195334 is not shown).
- Example to show only the very first edit on a page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&action=history&dir=prev&limit=1
- Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20090815195334&dir=prev&contribs=user&target=Atlgirl052005
- feed
- a feed for the changes in the history is returned; allowed values are
atom
andrss
. Can be disabled with $wgFeed . - go
- (deprecated - should be avoided, because it has been superseded)
go=first
the first (earliest) page of history is shown
Raw
Passing action=raw
returns the source code of a page or revision. For caching and security reasons, this should generally only be used via the script path, that is, index.php?title=...
.
While "short urls" like /wiki/
are only meant for action=view, they unofficially tend to work for other actions as well.
This is expressly discouraged for action=raw as it leads to less effective caching and bypasses automatic purging after edits.
- templates
- if passed with value
expand
, templates within the page are expanded; - ctype
- the content-type value to be used in the HTTP header when returning the raw content, instead of the default
text/x-wiki
; this can only be one of the allowed types, which currently aretext/x-wiki
,text/javascript
,text/css
, andapplication/x-zope-edit
- oldid
- the id of a specific revision to return
- direction
- either
next
,prev
, orcur
; instead of the revision specified by oldid, returns the one following it, the one preceding it, or the current (last) one; - section
- Limits output to a particular section or subsections of the document. Sections are specified with non-negative integers : section 0 being the section before any named sections, section one being the first named section or subsection and so on. The numbering scheme treats sections and subsections as identical. A list of the sections and subsections can be obtained via API with api.php?action=parse&text={{:My_page}}__TOC__&prop=sections.
Edit and submit
The edit and submit actions perform almost the same action. By default, they return an "edit page" form for the page. Different results can be obtained by passing other arguments; some results (such as saving the new version of a page) can only be obtained using POST. This action takes the standard arguments for specifying a page or a page revision.
Options affecting the edit form
The following options produce an effect on the edit form. (Note: 'section' also affects how the page is saved. Additionally, 'preload' and 'preloadparams' only work on wikitext contentmodel)
- section
- specifies the index of a section within a document to preload and edit; sections are numbered sequentially from 0 on; section 0 is the part of the article before the first section header; value
new
is used to append a new section to the document; - preload
- specifies a page, of which the wikitext is used as the initial value of the textarea in the edit form if the page or section to be edited does not exist; if it exists the preload command is ignored; also see Manual:Creating pages with preloaded text ;
- preloadparams[] (or preloadparams[])
- Replace
$1
style parameters in preload text. For example https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Sandbox?action=edit§ion=new&preload=Manual:Creating_pages_with_preloaded_text/param_demo&preloadparams[]=first value&preloadparams[]=second value would cause Manual:Creating pages with_preloaded text/param demo to be preloaded into the edit form, but with$1
replaced by first value and$2
replaced by second value. (introduced in 1.23) - editintro
- title of an existing article or template to be rendered above the edit form;
- preloadtitle
- in the case of section=new, provides initial content of the "Subject/headline" box; it can be edited before saving;
- Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:5dsddddd&action=edit§ion=new&preloadtitle=The [[WP:ARS|Article Rescue Squadron]]
- Example with both preloadtitle and preload: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Talk:Ikip?action=edit§ion=new&preload=Template:Article_Rescue_Squadron_ invite&preloadtitle=Invitation
- nosummary
- Do not show the "headline" box when doing section=new.
- summary
- its value is used as the edit summary in place of the default one.
- preview
- if set to
yes
orno
, overrides user preference "Show preview when starting to edit" (task T11936); - internaledit/externaledit (removed in 1.22)
- overrides user preference on external editors;
- mode (removed in 1.22)
- this parameter affects the result page if passed with value
file
and using an external editor; - undo, undoafter
- attempts to undo a sequence of edits, from the
undoafter
revision up to theundo
revision; technically, this is done by trying to merge the inverse of these edits with the sequence of all subsequent edits; the values of these parameters are ids of old revisions of a page; if merge is not possible, a regular edit form for that revision is returned
What to do
The following options tell the software what to do when submitting: saving, showing a preview, or showing the difference with the current version.
- wpSave
- this argument is generated when saving the content of an edit form returned by the server, but is not actually used nor required when submitting (see below for required arguments to save);
- wpPreview
- set in a POST request to request a preview of the page or section as if the value of wpTextbox1 were saved;
- by default, returns an edit form with a preview of the value of wpTextbox1;
- if the additional
live
argument is passed, only the rendering of the value of wpTextbox1 is shown, not the form and the other GUI element; this is similar to the result of saving and then viewing withaction=render
; see Manual:Live preview for more info; - the argument
wpLivePreview
is identical to wpPreview; therefore, a regular preview is returned iflive
is not passed;
- wpDiff
- set in a POST request to request a table showing the changes between the current version of the page or section and the version as if value of wpTextbox1 were saved;
Parameters that are needed to save
The following parameters are required when a user saves a page. The edit summary field may also be required if so configured (see below).
- wpTextbox1
- the new page/section content;
- wpStarttime
- the timestamp of when the user started editing the page; used to check whether the page has been deleted between this moment and the submission time (in this case, the user is asked to confirm saving);
- wpRecreate
- in case the page was deleted after wpStarttime, this field confirms that the page is to be saved;
- wpEdittime
- for new pages, it is equal to wpStarttime; otherwise, it is the timestamp of the last revision of the page; used to check edit conflicts;
- wpEditToken
- an edit token; this is used to avoid users from being tricked into saving a page by following a link or pressing a button in an external site. For non-logged-in users, wpEditToken is required since phab:rSVN18112; it currently contains only the characters
\
rather than a random string (see edit token suffix).
For the page to be saved, wpStarttime
, wpEdittime
, wpTextbox1
and wpEditToken
are required in a POST request, and neither wpPreview
nor wpDiff
are passed.
If the page was deleted after wpStarttime
, the boolean option wpRecreate
is also required.
Optional additional data
The edit summary or the "ignore blank" parameter may be mandatory if "warn on blank summaries" is configured.
- wpSummary
- the edit summary;
- wpMinoredit
- if set in a save request, the edit is marked as minor; for preview and diff, it is the initial value of "this is a minor edit" checkbox in the edit form;
- wpWatchthis
- if passed on a save request, the page is added to the user's watchlist; if it is not passed in a save request, the page is removed from the user's watchlist; for preview or diff, this is the initial value of the "watch this page" checkbox of the edit form;
- wpSection
- specify the index of a section within a document to submit to; sections are numbered sequentially from 0 on; section 0 is the part of the article before the first section header; value
new
is used to append a new section to the document; - wpChangeTags
- an optional comma-separated list of tags to be added to the edit. If any of the provided tags are not activated for manual use, the edit will be rejected.
- wpAutoSummary
- contains the MD5-hashing of the edit summary field as initially presented to the user in the edit form; this field is used to check if the user has modified that field before submitting: if the MD5 hashing of the value of
wpEditSummary
is the same as this field, the edit summary has not been modified; - wpIgnoreBlankSummary
- save page even if user has not modified the edit summary, while they were supposed to;
- wpTextbox2
- in case of an edit conflict, it contains the value of wpTextbox1 of the save request that generated the conflict;
- wpScrolltop
- used to preserve the scrollbar position in the edit textbox when loading a preview.
- redlink
- if the user does not have permission to edit the page, redirect to the empty article page (e.g., "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name") instead of showing the permission error notice. If the target page exists, ignore the
edit
parameter and display the (now-)existing page instead. This parameter is used on red links. - wpExtraQueryRedirect
- hidden input to modify after save URL and is not used by actual edit form. Intended to be used by gadgets and such.
Special pages
Most special pages have additional parameters, specific to the function they perform. As an example, the parameters for Special:Export are outlined in Manual:Parameters to Special:Export
The following URL parameters provide initial values for some input fields; they can be edited before submitting the form.
- wpNewTitle
- text field with new title.
- wpReasonList
- reason to pre-select in the dropdown.
- wpReason
- text field with reason.
- wpLeaveRedirect
- whether to select the "Leave a redirect behind" checkbox.
- wpDisableEmail
- whether to select the "Sending email" checkbox.
- wpDisableUTEdit
- whether to select the "Editing their own talk page" checkbox.
- wpReason
- initially selected item in the drop-down box, value should match a row in the MediaWiki:Ipbreason-dropdown.
- wpReason-other
- text field with custom reason; require
wpReason=other
- wpAutoBlock
- whether to select the "Automatically block the last IP address used by this user, and any subsequent IP addresses they try to edit from, for a period of $1" checkbox.
- wpWatch
- whether to select the "Watch this user's user and talk pages" checkbox.
- user-reason
- text field with reason.
Maxlag parameter
MediaWiki versions: | 1.10 – 1.27 |
The maxlag parameter is used only if the software is running on a replicated database cluster.
The maxlag parameter makes it so a request is not served if there is high server traffic. maxlag parameter applies to all actions. maxlag parameter value is a number; the lower this value, the lower the traffic that causes the request not to be served. Zero is not allowed.
Notes
- ↑ Clients submitting forms should submit all form parameters present in the HTML; relying on any kind of static list may lead to future breakage. To register new actions with an installation of MediaWiki, see $wgActions .
- ↑ Additionally, any action except 'view' may be disabled by using the $wgActions variable.
Additionally, $wgActions is available now for all actions.
Additionally, if searches are enabled and the
search
parameter is supplied (and non-blank) then all actions are ignored and the search is performed. - ↑
Deletion is performed upon a POST request, if a valid edit token is passed as the value of
wpEditToken
; this is what happens when the user confirms deletion. The delete reason is passed as the value of argumentwpReason
; this string is recorded in the deletion log (thelog_comment_id
field of the logging table) Deletion is also performed when deleting a single version of an image; this requires the version id to be passed in the parameteroldimage
and a valid edit token inwpEditToken
; in this case, the request can also be passed via GET - ↑
- if the optional
summary
argument is passed, its value is used as the edit summary in place of the default one - if the optional
bot
argument is passed, the edit will be marked as a bot one (the edit is markedrc_bot=1
in the recentchanges table) - the
bot
argument can also be used on any page a [rollback] link will appear on, to cascade&bot=1
to all rollback links generated - if the optional
hidediff
argument is passed, the success message is shown instead of a diff of the change (this can be forced via user preferences)
- if the optional
- ↑ These levels are changed to the values of
mwProtect-level-edit
andmwProtect-level-move
if the request is a POST one and a valid edit token is passed aswpEditToken
; parametermwProtect-reason
gives the reason for protection or unprotection which will be recorded in the page log; ifmwProtect-cascade
is also passed, cascading protection is applied (all transcluded pages are set to the same protection levels)- more generally, the actions that can be limited are those listed in the $wgRestrictionTypes array; this array is initialized to
array('edit','move')
and can be changed in LocalSettings.php ; the protection action then accept a parametermwProtect-level-$action
for each action in that array
- more generally, the actions that can be limited are those listed in the $wgRestrictionTypes array; this array is initialized to
- ↑ Before rev:r31291, Editredlink did the same thing that is now achieved by
action=edit&redlink=1
(see below for an explanation of the redlink parameter) - ↑ For security reasons, in some versions of MediaWiki Raw is only allowed when using the "primary script access point", that is, when using the "ugly" URL form with
index.php?title=...
- ↑
- requires $wgUseAjax to be true; the only callable functions are those in the array $wgAjaxExportList
- additional parameters:
rs
is the function name (e.g.,rs=wfSajaxSearch
); thersargs[]
array is the list of arguments of this function (e.g.,rsargs[]=abcd
passes theabcd
string to the function). - the JavaScript function
sajax_do_call
for calling Ajax functions is defined in ajax.js .
- ↑ Project:Tech News/2017#Tech News: 2017-16
- ↑ Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements#May 2020: First deployment - officewiki and testwiki
- ↑ For performance reasons, the value of this field is not actually an offset (the index of the first entry to show)
See also
- Markup spec
- API:Main module
- Help:URL
- Listing of functions
- Snippets/Load JS and CSS by URL (adds withJS and withCSS parameters which are processed on the client side)