Changing preferences in Mediawiki

Accessing your preferences

In order to access your preferences (i.e. the way in which you view/edit and generally experience the Mediawiki environment) you will need to be logged in. In the top right of the page you can see a set of six links:

• your user page (indicated by your username)
• "my talk page" (where people can 'message' you directly)
• "my preferences" (the set-up specific to your user account)
• "my watchlist" (where you can see changes that have been made to pages you are watching)
• "my contributions" (displays all the contributions you personally have made to the Mediawiki since you first received a user account
• "log out" (which allows you to [[Logging into the INTARESE Mediawiki|log out] from your account)

Preferences page

In the preferences page you can easily and quickly change the way in which you view and edit with the INTARESE Mediawiki. It is quite possible to leave all these settings on the defaults assigned to them when you first opened your account, but in order to personalise your experience of the Mediawiki environment, you can change settings within ten tabs:

• User profile
• Skin
• Files
• Date and time
• Editing
• Rich editor
• Recent changes
• Watchlist
• Search
• Misc

While some of these tabs may seem self-explanatory, it is a good idea to look through the various options presented on each of them.

Changing the way you edit - the Rich Text editor

Since the addition of the Rich Text editor it has become possible to write within the Mediawiki without using the wiki mark-up i.e. using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. This may be of particular use to those as yet unaccustomed to editing pages using the wiki mark-up, and who are used to using word processing software. There are drawbacks to using the Rich Text editor, however. The most important is perhaps the lack of templates for executing argumentation as proposed in the open risk assessment method, which is normally carried out within the discussion page (or "talk page") of each article. While it is possible to toggle between wiki mark-up and Rich Text within the Rich Text editor, the toolbar including the templates will not, at the time of writing, appear. For this reason, it is possible to remove the Rich Text editor from the so-called "Talk" namespace.

From "my preferences", click on the "Rich Editor" tab and select Disable rich editor within the "Talk" namespace. It is also possible to disable the Rich Editor from any namespace (i.e. from any type of page) if you don't like the features it offers. The changes made will be saved only if you click on "Save" at the bottom of your preferences page, and the changes will only effect your personal experience of Mediawiki, not the functioning of the pages themselves for anyone else viewing/editing them.