MediaWiki:Architecture of SAR service

Items & properties

Items and properties are core to wikibase. They operate like a very flexible database. The SAR service relies on some information being properly entered. See Item:Q102 for an example.

Templates

Templates are a MediaWiki system that allow filling text modularly. There is extensive documentation on the MediaWiki docs.

Templates admit all kinds of parameters, and are extremely flexible in what you can template. For instance, you can template away which template to use!

Note that templates can be used from within gadgets or user scripts (see below) as well as regular pages.

This is what we use to build access requests, relying on three templates principally:

• Template:Access to compose the text of an access request;
• Template:Mailto to create a Mailto link;
• Template:MailtoAccess to combine the two.

Gadgets, user scripts and CSS

MediaWiki has many extension systems. There is a way to add javascript code or CSS upon page load, and to configure for this to happen independently for each user or site-wide. See MediaWiki's documentation.

• gadgets are site-wide javascript, which can be configured by the admin to be opt-in or opt-out, with users able to change the choice in

Currently, wiki.personaldata.io does not have that part of the system enabled.

• common.js are also site-wide javascript, and defined on PersonalData.IO here
• user-scripts are custom javascript, set up by each user separately. Yours is here, but is currently inactive as one additional option needs to be activated on wiki.personaldata.io.