I found that <ul id="footer-info"> is empty on my special pages. Example: See the footer on compared to . MediaWiki 1.27.
Is this a meant to be this way?
How can I show the footer-info on special pages too?
Topic on Project:Support desk
By the way: It's the same on Wikipedia... I guess it's a bug, isn't it?
It is supposed to be like this. That footer class is apparently not included for Special pages.
To manually add it, you will probably have to try to include some code in your MediaWiki:Common.css
Interestingly, the mobile site through Extension:MobileFrontend does use the same footer for both namespaces.
I think the fact that this element is empty on Special pages, is a bug. At least, I do not see a reason, why it should not be there on these pages...
Possibly because extensions which also create Special pages use a variety of licences.
> At least, I do not see a reason, why it should not be there on these pages...
I second that.
footer-info is usually used to show information about licenses. And some special pages are accessible by visitors too. So they should see the license information on those pages too.
> Possibly because extensions which also create Special pages use a variety of licences.
Then the Creative Commons logo should be also not displayed on special pages. But it is displayed.
I will post this on Phabricator now and I'm exited about their feedback.
Just wrote a task on Phabricator and added some more info to it: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141696
To the licence issue: There also are extensions, which are distributed under the same licence as MediaWiki - if MediaWiki only shows the licence there if it is identical to MediaWiki's own licence, then these pages should show the licence information. But on these pages the licence information is missing as well. There also are other situations, in which "external" content is shown in a page, this e.g. is the case for images. These also may be provided under different licences, but the footer still stays the same. Even if an extension adds content to a page, same as for an image, which gets added to a page, it still is the MediaWiki system, which creates the complete output out of this as a whole.
By default, the standard licence information should just be present on Special pages and that's it.
Regarding the images, probably why the Wikimedia foundation uses the copyright text as "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply."
Anyway, I just checked a few of system messages under the MediaWiki namespace too (Special:AllMessages), it would appear the pages which are not "created" or have not been edited even once (i.e. with the red link) also do not show the copyright text while other "blue-linked" pages do show the text.
Similar is the case with any article page which has not been edited once (in this case it would mean it has not even been created).
Therefore, this is probably what the MediaWiki core checks before deciding to show the copyright information or not.
> "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply."
I think this must be talking about the content, because MediaWiki itself is published under the GNU General Public License. So actually the output of the MediaWiki system itself (like the menu, the editing area, the speical pages) is not talked about at all.
Yes, that is pretty much what I meant. The text might be under CC but other things (which should include images and other multimedia too) could be under a variety of licences.
In any case, they included "additional terms may apply", that pretty much means people will have to read all the other terms before assuming CC is enforced for everything by default.
Also, as I mentioned in my previous comment, the exclusion of copyright info in Special pages is likely to be because those pages haven't been "created". or edited once.
Actually, this is not a problem with Special pages, it is a problem with pages, which have no revision (also with normal content pages, which have not yet been created).
I tried tracking this one down:
In VectorTemplate.php, the footer section is created based on the content of $this->getFooterLinks(). To do that, $this->getFooterLinks() in BaseTemplate.php builds an array of the available footer links. If after this step one of the different footer link categories is empty, then this category is removed - this is what happens to the footer-info category, which Stefahn is asking about. These links are retrieved from $this->get( 'footerlinks' ), which is defined in QuickTemplate.php. There it takes the information from $this->data[$name], in our case from $this->data['footerlinks'].
$this->data['footerlinks'] again is set up in SkinTemplate.php, function prepareQuickTemplate(). The exact name of the link in question is footer-info-copyright. After that point, the hooks SkinTemplateOutputPageBeforeExec and SkinAfterContent are run. With these hooks, especially with SkinTemplateOutputPageBeforeExec, the links, which should be displayed, can be modified!
87.123.62.168: I think it would be helpful if you add your findings to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141696