Author: nickpj
Description:
The 'MediaWiki default' user is used by MediaWiki as a system-level user, to record actions performed by MediaWiki itself or by extension. For example, the very first edit to initialise the "Main Page" on a new wiki is performed by the 'MediaWiki default' user.
However, this user does not seem to be created during wiki creation. ( Note: I have only tested this with 1.12.0 stable, and on a very quick examination it still looks like this is the case in SVN head, but I could be wrong ). As shown with an example database query:
mysql> select * from user where user_name like 'MediaWiki default';
Empty set (0.00 sec)
mysql> select * from revision where rev_user_text = 'MediaWiki default';
+--------+----------+-------------+-------------+----------+-------------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+---------+---------------+
| rev_id | rev_page | rev_text_id | rev_comment | rev_user | rev_user_text | rev_timestamp | rev_minor_edit | rev_deleted | rev_len | rev_parent_id |
+--------+----------+-------------+-------------+----------+-------------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+---------+---------------+
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | MediaWiki default | 20080522074310 | 0 | 0 | 449 | NULL | |
+--------+----------+-------------+-------------+----------+-------------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+---------+---------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
The 'MediaWiki default' user is referred to in ~ 7 places in core (grep -nr 'MediaWiki default' includes/ config/ maintenance/ ), and ~ 5 places in extensions (grep -nr 'MediaWiki default' extensions/ ).
My primary concern is for logging - I would like to be able to add something to the log, from the 'MediaWiki default' user, and have it appear normally in [[Special:Log]]. However at the moment such
entries do not appear, because Special:Log performs a join between the user table and the logging table. One possible solution may be to create the 'MediaWiki default' user when creating the wiki, and possibly also when upgrading the wiki.
Version: 1.13.x
Severity: minor
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MediaWiki_default