WikiIndex talk:About

Namespace for "About"

This page says itself that it is a "'meta' page". So people browsing the real "content" pages or selecting "random page" won't be particularly pleased to see it. Why not reverse the redirect so that it's in the "meta" namespace? robinp 02:13, 7 Feb 2006 (EST)

Can you explain more?

I am not clear.

Goodness, I didn't know anyone was around, least of all one of the experts, Mark!!!

The page (if you reach it from a click on some of the "About" links) says "(Redirected from WikiIndex:About)". Somebody must have decided to move it to the main ("article") namespace. Maybe there was discussion and consensus. If so, I'll say no more. BUT most wikis I've been working on keep "machinery" ("meta") pages away from the article space, mostly in the "project" namespace (which here translates to "WikiIndex:"), so that visitors who don't want to contribute but do want to sample the content can click on "random page" and see nothing but content, not pages about how to create or improve the content. robinp 02:34, 7 Feb 2006 (EST)

Please show me pages examples of what you mean :-) MarkDilley | talk

Mark, Robin has a similar issue that I had when I first got here. Robin, we've been using Namespace Conventions as a place for this conversation. The status quo right now is that meta pages are in the article namespace. We've made this decision because

1. this is a wiki about wikis so meta is on topic
2. we're not using the random page feature anyway

TedErnst | talk 15:34, 7 Feb 2006 (EST)

clean up

seems we are now using some of the built in namespaces, (and by the way, I can gloat, my idea of namespaces is correct! We can add 155 new namespaces to this wiki if we want) and we are using RandomPage now... MarkDilley

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see http://wikicompany.org/wiki/Wikicompany:Wikicompany_v_Wikipedia for some ideas to tease ourselves away from being thought of as a wikipedia site.

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http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/2_Thermidor_CCXIV recognizes that WikiIndex is coming from a slightly different angle than Wikipedia.

Namespace creation

I didn't really know where to put this discussion, but some MediaWikis (I'll take Uncyclopedia for instance) have spacial pages called Special:Namespaces that looks exactly like the interwiki modification. Install? – Smiddle / T·C·@ 13:34, 5 November 2006 (EST)

I'm not really sure what you're suggesting we use namespaces for. Could you please elaborate? TedErnst | talk 00:07, 6 November 2006 (EST)

The talk page to aide pages would appear at:

French namespaces

• "Discussion Aide:" instead of "Talk:Aide:"
• "Discussion WikiIndex:" instead of "Talk:WikiIndex:" well, we also need to create a new French project namespace. (Projet maybe?)

Misc

• "Proposal talk:" instead of "Talk:Proposal"
• "WikiProject talk:" instead of "Talk:WikiProject" – Smiddle / T·C·@ 14:29, 14 November 2006 (EST)

Go for it. TedErnst | talk 14:59, 14 November 2006 (EST)
We need a new project namespace in French, also. What about IndexDeDesWikis or something? – Smiddle / T·C·@ 14:12, 17 November 2006 (EST)

The Special:Namespaces page was something that appeared briefly in one fork (1.6-database) of the MediaWiki.org distribution, then disappeared just as quickly. The extension allowed bureaucrats to take control of the list of namespaces directly from the web interface, which made initial configuration a little easier.

The version currently on uncyclopedia.info (not the main Uncyclopedia or related Wikia, but a few localised projects like pt: zh-tw: ja: fi: hu: that live on a dedicated server) is just a quick kludge. It was created by modifying the Special:Interwiki extension to update the namespace_names database table and language/Languages.php to read the language names from this database. This kludge was a way to avoid losing Special:Namespaces entirely during upgrades to MW1.7/1.8.

The usual procedure to add MW namespaces is to edit the LocalSettings.php file directly. That much works on most or all MW versions, although MW1.4 was limited to 127 pair of namespaces (vs. 32K on all later versions).

The 'official' version of Special:Namespaces was eventually supposed to do much more - including moving already-existing pages into a newly-created namespace as needed - but as far as I know, none of this ever came to fruition. Unfortunate. --Carlb 13:40, 4 December 2006 (EST)