WikiIndex talk:Namespace conventions

main

• Wiki people pages go in the main article space per John's comment.
  • We kind of hope that WikiIndex will be more than a list of Wikis. Initially we have added Wiki People as the second major dataset. As we have done in ICANNWiki, we hope to be able to put names to faces and build a more connected and less isolated community of people who consider themselves wiki people. We hope to really kick this off at the RecentChangesCamp in Feb. To answer your question directly we would like to keep all of these major datasets in the main namespace to facilitate crosslinking of the datasets. In the case of the user namespace we don't want to limit Wiki People to users and we don't want them to have to use the namespace prefix when crosslinking. John Stanton 12:26, 19 Jan 2006 (EST)
• What else goes here?
  • Are we using the Random Page feature? If not, never mind. If so, then I believe it searches only in the main namespace, so if we want people to be able to find random wikis only, not random users or meta conversations, let's take this into account.
    • I think Random pages are not an important issue to us right now. John Stanton 12:26, 19 Jan 2006 (EST)
      • And even if Random pages feature is used, Wiki People would be pages you want to be found this way, so that works as well. TedErnst
• Moving these here from the article where they were listed as examples. WikiNode, TourBusStop, SandBox Is it okay to talk about them? In my mind, if we have an articles about WikiNodes, the network & general concept, that goes in the main namespace. Our own wikinode, however, goes in the WikiIndex namespace. I can be persuaded on this. I'm thinking that the same goes for the other two. An article about the tour bus system would go in main, but our stop goes in wikiindex. An article about the sandbox concept could go in main and our sandbox in wikiindex. And perhaps I'm looking at this all wrong. I'm thinking of it as "outward facing" and "inward facing". For people that are coming here to use the resource we're creating, we want them to only really see the outward-facing stuff. For those that want to edit, to participate, to be a guest or a visitor or a participant, then they can see under the hood and see the WikiIndex namespace. This is just where I'm coming from at the moment. Would love to hear others ways of looking at this. TedErnst | talk 16:54, 27 Mar 2006 (EST)

WikiIndex

Tristam, what function does having WikiIndex in the title of this page serve? -- MarkDilley

It is WikiIndex:Community Portal in the sidebar. I did not notice that it is Community Portal in some other bar until I moved the page. WikiIndex prefix tells that the page is related to the community itself, it is not an ordinary article. You can read more about namespaces in Meta-wiki. Special namespaces are very common in MediaWikis. Tristram Shandy 11:34, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

I'm moving everything out of WikiIndex, including Community Portal. Please interpret this as an efficiently suggested suggestion and feel free to change it back as appropriate. TedErnst 13:31, 24 Jan 2006 (EST)

I'm moving meta pages back into the WikiIndex namespace, as an attempt to get a handle on meta pages and categorization of guidelines, policies and collaborations. I'm hoping this will make it easier for others to then come in here and help us if things are well-defined. TedErnst | talk 13:53, 10 Mar 2006 (EST)

Examples of issues discussed

• I believe TedErnst was trying to help me understand that RecursiveNatureOfWiki belonged somewhere else, perhaps WikiIndex: RecursiveNatureOfWiki. Is this what you were thinking Ted? Best, MarkDilley
  • I see articles about wiki in general, like the spam measures example above, as perfectly legitimate in the main namespace. As RecursiveNatureOfWiki stands right now, it seems like a meta conversation that would be better placed at [[WikiIndex: RecursiveNatureOfWiki]. Now I'm not sure I grok the concept so I might be missing it and maybe it really isn't meta issue for this wiki, but a larger issue of the WikiSphere, in which case it seems to me it should stay where it is. Is my way of thinking about these things helpful to anyone? TedErnst 13:50, 21 Jan 2006 (EST)

• It is helpful, because I know you have ideas about organization, it is just us trying to discover our (diff)! :-) Do WikiIndex: Foo stay out of the random page generator? Or is it that they are labeled that way, and thus more easily disinguished by the average user? MarkDilley
  • We're not using the random page thing at this point, so I'd saw we should ignore that as an argument for namespaces. My present feeling on this is the meta pages should use WikiIndex:Foo because they are internal documents of, by, and for editors of this wiki. External documents are anything we think the average reader should be seeing. As described above, so far we have Wikis, WikiPeople and ArticlesAboutWikiSphere in that category. If you'd like to also have the meta pages there, obviously you can. And since that's simpler, maybe it's even better that way. We know template and category are useful namespaces because they have different functionality. User talk is useful because of the notification feature. Those are all of the namespace-related functions that I know of. If your requirement is functionality, then I see no reason at all to use the WikiIndex namespace. I can't really come up with anything convincing to say why we should use it for meta conversations, but I still think we should. I will not pout if it's decide otherwise. :-) TedErnst 15:50, 21 Jan 2006 (EST)

• Example of how I think of namespaces: http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/MemeTank:Meme - the namespace here is MemeTank: MarkDilley

I don't understand what this example is illustrating. TedErnst | talk 00:12, 4 Apr 2006 (EDT)

• Namespaces are easy in wiki. MediaWiki has built-in namespaces, and function with them, as I understand. But inheriently namespaces are easy in wiki. As I have asserted before MarkDilley:Foo and MarkDilley:FooTwo are just putting Foo and FooTwo in the MarkDilley namespace. It feels elementary to me, but maybe I am just not understanding what the importance of not understanding namespaces in this way is. MarkDilley. (Plus I am seeing your statement about the namespace of WikiIndex as an internal space, so why would we put public pages such as WikiNode, SandBox and TourBusStop in metaspace?)

help namespace

I did some moving around a while back, re-creating the WikiIndex prefix for meta stuff. I wasn't clear on which pages would be considered "Help", so I didn't use that one. Which pages would go in there at this point? TedErnst | talk 16:36, 27 Mar 2006 (EST)

More Namespaces available

If I understand this software correctly, we have 155 more namespaces availabe to us to define. We do have to do some hardwiring to the software, but it seemed fairly easy. MarkDilley

• • found some information on it: WikiMedia:Namespaces