FlightGear wiki:Notes to administrators

Shortcut FGW:NTA

This is a collection of notes to administrators to help them with the maintenance that regular users cannot do. Please do extend/update this article so that others can more easily help with recurring tasks.

Common tasks

Interwiki data

• Interwiki links (including translations interwikis) can be viewed and edited from Special:Interwiki.

Deletion

See also {{delete}} and {{delete-sp}}.

• Before deleting, check the page history.
• An old page with lot of edits and views should probably not be deleted, but instead be turned into a redirect to a page that has a similar subject. Also, deleting a well-visited page can cause a lot of broken links on the forum or in the devel list archives

Dealing with spam

• Newly-registered users whose first and only contribution clearly and unambiguously was spam can safely be blocked indefinitely and have their contributions deleted.
• Make sure the edit summary does not contain the offending links and other content, just the word "spam" and possibly a few words more.
• To add new blocking reasons, see MediaWiki:Ipbreason-dropdown
• If the wiki is regularly being spammed with similar page titles, consider adding a regex to MediaWiki:Titleblacklist
• Article protection reasons can be added via MediaWiki:Protect-dropdown

Maintenance categories

• Some of the maintenance categories, in particular Category:Considered for deletion and Category:Candidates for speedy deletion, should be looked at regularly.

Periodically recurring tasks

Updating the sidebar

• MediaWiki:Sidebar (e.g. to add/edit portals)

Newsletter

Note  This must also be done for the German translation.

1. Proof read and cleanup last month's newsletter (this can also be done by normal users)
2. Review/lock last month's newsletter
3. Copy the newsletter template to the next draft newsletter
4. Update/review the redirect at Next newsletter (should be automated)
5. Update the table at FlightGear Newsletter

FlightGear releases

See also release plan.

• Help write/review the changelog
• Start next changelog
• Update the redirect (Next changelog) (should be automated using Template:Current release)
• Update {{news}}
• Add article to the next newsletter
• Update the table in FlightGear History and the infobox in FlightGear (including other languages).
• Update {{current release}}
• Create a new category for tracking changes after releases (this keeps track of all newsletters published during a given release cycle)

Note  For bugfix releases, you only need to: Update FlightGear History and FlightGear Add a subsection to the relevant changelog (see here for example).

Misc

• Our custom Nasal syntax highlighting module is usually forgotten after MediaWiki software updates. Note that only Gijs (talk) and Hellosimon (talk), who have access to the server, can fix this issue.