Author: theevilipaddress

Description:
From my personal experience, I have noticed that it's often not possible for some regular user not that experienced with MediaWiki to really customize the sidebar to their wishes. By default, the syntax consists of headings that are MediaWiki message keys and if they don't exist, they're used as plain text. The lists then continue with link-similar syntax (just without the brackets) where one is a MediaWiki message with the page name and the other a MediaWiki message with the link text. If some of the message keys don't exist, then the plain text is used as link anchor or link title. If you want to set a tooltip or accesskey for the links, then you're required to create the "tooltip-*" or "accesskey-*" messages. The left part of the pipe will also be used as HTML id attribute. In the end, some capitalized things like SEARCH, TOOLBOX and LANGUAGES come, that are defined by the MediaWiki software. (At least, that's how I understood it, correct me if I'm wrong)

Whereas this probably works for power users or wikis like en.wikipedia where there are definitely people who get it how it works, I think that this is too complex for the casual user, especially considering that there seems to be no documentation for it. What I would have in mind as a solution would be a GUI, probably on something like Special:Sidebar (of course only accessible for admins), where there are input fields where you write the values for link anchor, link text, tooltip, accesskey and checkboxes to use a MediaWiki message instead of plain text, so that wikis like Commons can still have localizable sidebars and for backwards compability with older versions.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement