Remove default nonexistent footer links

Question

I have a problem with my MediaWiki installation on a local network. I'm using MediaWiki in German. There are several footer links in my wiki, that throw a 404 error. For example in the footer there's a link Impressum (in English: Disclaimer). It points to *NameOfMyWiki*:Impressum which does not exist.

When I go to MediaWiki:Disclaimers, then a Disclaimer shows up, it's the page that should be behind *wgSitename*:Impressum. I don't think it's intended that I have to point the disclaimer link to MediaWiki:Disclaimers.

Another behaviour that probably is based on the same problem is, that a user gets a 404 on his own user page, when the user page is still empty/not already created (clicking on the link on the top right next to settings). When another user edits the user page of the first user, the first user then can access and edit it, too. But not when it's still empty/not defined.

How can I fix that?

Answer 1

The text of the footer links comes from the interface messages MediaWiki:Privacy, MediaWiki:Aboutsite and MediaWiki:Disclaimers. To disable one or more of these links, set the corresponding link text to a single hyphen (-).

Alternatively, since MediaWiki 1.17, you can also modify the footer by defining a hook in your LocalSettings.php.

Ps. For anyone interested in going to all the way to the source, the code that handles these links is in the Skin::footerLink() method. The practice of disabling various interface features by setting the corresponding message to - is actually pretty common (though not universal) in MediaWiki; completely blank messages are treated a bit weirdly for historical reasons, so - is commonly used as a stand-in for "no value".

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Edit: I just noticed that you were also asking a second question about user pages. To answer that question better, let me start by describing how MediaWiki should be treating non-existent pages:

• When MediaWiki sees a wikilink (most, though not necessarily all, links in the navigation menus are also handled the same way) pointing to a non-existent page, it creates what is known as a redlink. These links are styled differently from normal links (typically they're colored red, hence the name) and point to an URL that looks something like this one, with the parameters action=edit (making it a special kind of edit link) and redlink=1.

• When a user clicks such a link, MediaWiki first checks that the page hasn't been created in the mean time, and, if it hasn't been, that the user is allowed to create and edit it:

  1. If the page exists, the user is just redirected to the normal view URL for the page.

  2. If the page doesn't exist, and the user is not allowed to create it, they're also redirected to the normal view URL, which then returns an HTTP 404 status code and a message saying that the page does not exist. (This is what will happen if you click the "like this one" link above, unless you happen to be an admin on Wikipedia.)

  3. Finally, if the page doesn't exist but the user is allowed to create it, MediaWiki just treats the URL like a normal edit link and shows the edit form.

It looks like, for some reason, new users clicking the link to their own user page on your wiki are hitting case 2 above instead of the expected case 3. This might be a user rights issue: in particular, you should check that normal logged-in users (group user) on your wiki have the createpage permission.

If you want to allow normal users to create only their own user pages, there are ways to do that, but all that I know of involve either installing an extension or writing your own getUserPermissionsErrors hook. I can give you some examples of how to do that if you want, but it takes a bit of coding.