Extension:PageAuthors

MediaWiki extensions manual

PageAuthors Release status: stable
Implementation	Parser function
Description	Get a sensible list of page authors
Author(s)	Sophivorustalk
Latest version	1.4 (2022-08-10)
MediaWiki	1.35+
PHP	7+
Database changes	No
License	GNU General Public License 3.0 or later
Download	Download extension Git [?]: Download Git master browse repository (GitHub) commit history repository contributors (GitHub) code review
Example	[1]
Parameters $wgPageAuthorsMinBytesPerEdit $wgPageAuthorsDelimiter $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreGroups $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreBots $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreUsers $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreSystemUsers $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreMinorEdits $wgPageAuthorsLinkUserPages $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreBlocked $wgPageAuthorsMinBytesPerAuthor $wgPageAuthorsUseRealNames $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreAnons $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreSummaryPatterns
Hooks used GetMagicVariableIDs ParserFirstCallInit ParserGetVariableValueSwitch
Quarterly downloads	5 (Ranked 125th)
Translate the PageAuthors extension if it is available at translatewiki.net

The PageAuthors extension introduces a magic word {{PAGEAUTHORS}} that returns a list of the main page authors of a page, sorted by number of bytes added.

The extension is highly configurable so you can fine-tune what counts as an author.

Installation

• Download and move the extracted PageAuthors folder to your extensions/ directory.
  Developers and code contributors should install the extension from Git instead, using:cd extensions/
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/PageAuthors
• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file:

  wfLoadExtension( 'PageAuthors' );
  

•  Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

Usage

Simply add {{PAGEAUTHORS}} to any page and you will get a comma-separated list of the main authors of the current page, sorted by number of bytes added.

You can also do {{PAGEAUTHORS:Some page}} to get the list of authors for some page other than the current one.

See #Configuration to define your own criteria of what counts as an author and how the list of authors should be displayed.

Configuration

Each configuration is shown with its default value:

• $wgPageAuthorsMinBytesPerAuthor = 100; ― Minimum number of bytes that a user must add in order to be considered an author.
• $wgPageAuthorsMinBytesPerEdit = 10; ― Minimum number of bytes that each edit must reach in order to be counted towards the author's total. Having a positive value here already means that edits that reduce content don't count, which is usually desirable because even though synthesizing and removing problematic content is often valuable, we wouldn't say that makes you an author of the existing content.
• $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreMinorEdits = true; ― Whether to ignore edits marked as minor.
• $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreBlocked = true; ― Whether to ignore blocked users.
• $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreAnons = true; ― Whether to ignore anonymous users.
• $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreBots = true; ― Whether to ignore bots.
• $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreSystemUsers = true; ― Whether to ignore system users (such as in mass imports).
• $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreSummaryPatterns = [ '/Undo.*/', '/Revert.*/' ]; ― Ignore edits with edit summaries that match these PHP regex patterns. By default, edits with edit summaries that start with 'Undo' or 'Revert' will be ignored (these match the default edit summaries when doing a revert or a rollback in an English wiki). So for example, if some vandal blanks a page and then a user reverts it, the revert won't count towards the byte count of the user.
• $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreUsers = []; ― Ignore edits by these users (without "User:" prefix).
• $wgPageAuthorsIgnoreGroups = []; ― Ignore edits by these groups.
• $wgPageAuthorsUseRealNames = false; ― Show the real names when available, rather than the user names.
• $wgPageAuthorsLinkUserPages = false; ― Link each author to its user page.
• $wgPageAuthorsDelimiter = ', '; ― Delimiter between authors.

See also

• Manual:$wgMaxCredits - A built-in option to list the latest author followed by others in order of most recent edit, in the wiki footer. This is not reliable because often the latest authors aren't the main ones.
• Extension:Contributors - Lists authors by edit count. This is not reliable because some users tend to do few but big edits while others tend to do many small ones. Extreme but real cases include pages where the initial author creates the entire page in a single huge edit while other later editors make multiple edits fixing trivial issues.
• Extension:SemanticExtraSpecialProperties - The _EUSER property lists authors by chronological order. This is not reliable either because while it's often the case that the first few editors are the main authors, it also happens that later editors contribute significantly and may even rewrite the entire page.