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 all wiki sites. 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 cross-linking 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 cross-linking. John Stanton 12:26, 19 Jan 2006 (EST)

What else goes here?

Are we using the Special:Random 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 Wiki, 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 distinguished 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 all wikis, Wiki people, 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 inherently 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 meta-space?)

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)

Help: would mostly be for wiki markup tutorials and explaining the MediaWiki features, namely uploading and using images. Most wikis just snag a lot of their help content from the corresponding stuff on Wikipedia, or take the non-license incompatible (because they're GFDL, and this is a CC licensed wiki) stuff at MediaWiki.org —User:Sean Fennel@ 02:57, 27 May 2006 (EDT)

More Namespaces available

If I understand this software correctly, we have 155 more namespaces available 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: additional namespaces — at Wikimedia Meta-Wiki
• main page: Custom namespaces — at Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

The limit (as of MW v1.5 and subsequent) is 32759 custom namespace pairs Extension:Simple namespaces. --Carlb 13:02, 15 December 2006 (EST)

Main namespace vs alternate namespaces

Looking at the WikiNode, TourBusStop, sandbox, articles - as mentioned by TedErnst earlier, made me think that these are pages that people elsewhere may or may not want in their main namespace. So I think they are very good examples of something that could be viewed from the point of view of external wiki-editors.

WikiNode and TourBusStop in particular, are projects that people are trying to "push" onto other wikis, so thinking about how dumping them into someone's main namespace might be seen as disruptive might be helpful in thinking of the best way to "market" these two concepts to other wikis.

To help explain this, on my own wiki (Spelljammer Wiki) I'm trying to build up an encyclopedia of canon for an out of print role playing game. Having a WikiNode pop up on a random page search might not bother WikiIndex, but it would be more likely to confuse my own visitors. Projecting yourself into my boots and thinking about how I can make that a "backdoor" way into my wiki, might make it easier for you to "sell" this inter-wiki concept.

I've already seen that the WikiNode at Wikia got deleted. Maybe they thought it was spam. Or maybe someone uploaded a stub-like page that was never updated. But I do know that these two projects depend on co-operation between different wikis, so you kind of need to make them work for everyone, rather than just think of how WikiIndex is the website of wikis and that these are "obviously" core concepts. To everyone else inter-wiki information probably is an "off-topic" thing.

I'm not saying this to tell you: 'change the way that you run WikiIndex', but that you might want to pro-actively want to consider these sorts of issues (and issues I've not even thought of) and create how-to sections that allow people to join your WikiNode and TourBusStop fun in their own way.

On a second note, the "we don't use the random page at the moment" thing does not really hold, because you do have a search box and that allows people to search the following namespaces: (Main), Talk User, User talk, WikiIndex, WikiIndex talk, Image, Image talk, MediaWiki, MediaWiki talk, Template, Template talk, Help, Help talk, Category, Category talk. By default, search only searches in "main", so you need to take that into account, when designing new content areas for the wiki.

That search box is pretty powerful and I'm pretty sure that you can add new namespaces to it too. So if, for example, you were to have a "WikiPeople" namespace (instead of putting everyone into main), I could hop over to the WikiIndex search page and quickly search for anyone who might have specialist information in a specific field. Allowing people to quickly find people with common intersts, might help people to create a WikiNode that has a reciprocal link at the other end. So you could suggest something like that in a "How to find other wikis for your WikiNode" tutorial. But being able to search for wiki people separately, might also help people to make contact with other people that could offer topic-specific suggestions for setting up a new wiki.

On a third note, you have a few wikis (I think it is mostly wiki farms) that are listed as categories instead of normal pages in the main namespace. This means that if I search for something that is on the Wikia page, I won't see it. Having the content in main, and then having a link to "List of Wikia wikis" that points to the category could help get the search box to give the expected results.

On another note, you have a few big wikis (like Wikia), where people have added comments about how the wiki works. If you have a very complex wiki - and a wiki farm is a good example, it might be easier for visitors to have the basic stuff on a normal page (in the main namespace) and then use a bespoke namespace (in this case Wikia:) to dump all the other stuff. A Wikia namespace, could be used for creating various lists of Wikia wikis by different categories. It could also be used for creating something like a page that explains how people go about requesting a Wikia wiki*.

* = To counterpoint this sort of embedded specialist advice (for specific wiki farms), the main namespace could have a page that explains how to download and install each type of wiki software (or at least, how to find the information elsewhere). So as well as listing all the wikis in the world, you could also help people to start their own wiki (or sign up with any wiki farm in the world). I think a comparison of how various wiki code works may also be something that helps people to decide how helpful various wiki engines could be to them.

Just a few of suggestions for the conversation. I'll be interested to see how this wiki ends up using main. David Shepheard 07:22, 2 May 2009 (EDT)