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How to remove the meta (footer) links in MediaWiki

After you install MediaWiki there are some links to the meta pages (i.e. pages about the site) that are displayed by default. They are usually displayed in the footer of the site, but with some skins they may be displayed elsewhere, like in the top right corner. These links are Privacy policy, Disclaimers, and the About link; the About link includes the name of the site, so for example, if the name is Example Site, then the link will be labeled About Example Site.

If you want to hide these links, you can do this very quickly and easily with simple CSS modifications which you can perform from the frontend of your site.

Note that the modifications may work for one skin but not for another. In each skin the links are labeled with IDs which may or may not be the same as in other skins. As an example, we'll use the skins that come prepackaged with MediaWiki: Vector, MonoBook, Modern, Cologne Blue. The modifications suggested for these skins may work for many other skins, but it depends on the particular skin.

You can made CSS modifications by editing the page MediaWiki:Common.css on your site. The CSS changes specified there are applied to all skins in general, but depending on the coding of the skins, a particular modification may affect only specific skins. All the skins that use the same IDs as the ones in the modification that you add to the page will be affected. If you want to edit only a certain skin, you can do this by editing the page corresponding to that skin. It has the form MediaWiki:Skinname.css; so, for instance, if it's the Vector skin, the name of the page will be MediaWiki:Vector.css. To open these pages, you have to add their names to the main URL of the site. For example, if the homepage of the site is accessed at yourdomain.com, then you can open the page MediaWiki:Common.css with the URL yourdomain.com/index.php/MediaWiki:Common.css.

For some more general information you can also check out the article on how to make CSS modifications in MediaWiki. You'll find there tips on how to check the ID of a particular element (e.g. a footer link) on any skin that you use.

Now we'll go over the modifications for the skins that come prepackaged with MediaWiki.

Vector

To hide the Privacy policy link, add the following to MediaWiki:Common.css (or to MediaWiki:Vector.css):

#footer-places-privacy { display: none; }

For the About link use the code:

#footer-places-about { display: none; }

To remove the Disclaimers link use:

#footer-places-disclaimer { display: none; }

If you want to remove all three links, you can add only:

#footer-places { display: none; }

These modifications will not affect the skins MonoBook, Modern, Cologne Blue.

MonoBook and Modern

These two skins use the same IDs for the footer and the links there, so modifications are the same for both themes. This means that if you put them in MediaWiki:Common.css, both themes will be affected. If you want only one of the skins to be affected, use respectively MediaWiki:Monobook.css and MediaWiki:Modern.css.

To remove the link Privacy policy use:

#f-list #privacy { display: none; }

For the About link use:

#f-list #about { display: none; }

To hide the Disclaimers link add the code:

#f-list #disclaimer { display: none; }

If you add the code:

#f-list { display: none; }

this will hide all three links, but unlike the Vector skin, it will also remove the rest of the footer info: the number of times the page has been accessed, the last modification time, the information about the license agreement. Note however that it doesn't remove "Powered by MediaWiki".

Cologne Blue

Unlike the other prepackaged skins, with Cologne Blue the meta links are not displayed in the footer but in the top right corner of the page. There's one ID for all three links. So if you add the following to the page MediaWiki:Common.css (or to MediaWiki:Cologneblue.css):

#titlelinks { display: none; }

the links Privacy policy, About and Disclaimers will be removed.

Here are other articles on similar modifications related to the footer, or to CSS modifications in general that you may find useful:

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