WikiIndex talk:Community portal/Archive 4

Because the Community Portal has a ready-made link on the sidebar, it should contain substantial content, acting as a portal (which, as all Latin scholars and many web designers know, is a set of doorways leading to various good destinations). robinp 00:49, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

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)

Namespaces are quite an interesting concept. I've gotten quite used to them though my editing at Wikipedia. What they do, in essense, is seperate content meant for readers (the main article namespace) from everything else (talk pages for each article, user pages, user talk pages, project pages, project talk pages, templates, template talk pages, categories, category talk pages, etc). Of course all of that is overkill here, but whatever if it is used, if effectively hidden from the casual reader. Tedernst 13:15, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

It is a good question what namespaces we really need. Article namespace is the basic namespace without any prefix. We are going to use categories, images and templates, and their namespaces make them work, so they are not overkill. WikiIndex isn't as critical namespace, I don't have strong opinions about it. But if we put there also the Help pages (and get rid of the Help namespace), it has distinctive, important content. When you look at the All pages function, you can view pages from a certain namespace. Or you can choose to search from certain namespaces. WikiIndex namespace would make easier to find all kinds of guides and community pages. I have a gut feeling that it is difficult to get rid of talk page namespaces. Each page (except the Special pages) has a link to its talk pages. And only very clueless wiki citizens would write comments to templates. The comments would show in all pages that use the template, unless you marked the comments specially. Tristram Shandy 14:09, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

I forgot the user pages. The wiki software immediately shows you, if you have any new messages in your user talk page. So the user talk namespace is a must. And you must have an user namespace to also have an user talk namespace. Again, keeping your user page in the user namespace helps searching information from wiki. And Special:Listusers links to pages in user namespace, not to the article namespace. So the user pages should be like User:JohnSmith, not JohnSmith. When people write messages in Talk:JohnSmith, the software doesn't tell the user about them, unless the user has configured a watchlist. But you don't view your watchlist all the time. Tristram Shandy 17:12, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

A comment from Category:Wiki People: ... I don't think I like the user:MarkDilley stuff, I think Ray and Johns looks cleaner. MarkDilley

I don't know how to have the useful namespace functionality without having the prefixes. Mark linked his user talk page from the MarkDilley page, and Talk:MarkDilley redirects to User talk:MarkDilley. I think it isn't clean, but the User namespace is. Or then I am too accustomed to MediaWiki.

Still one more thing: according to Meta-wiki Special:Randompage selects some ...random page from the main namespace, which is the article namespace. People use Randompage to go to a random article, but they may land in a user page, if it is kept in the article namespace. Special pages are a namespace as well, for some tools in MediaWiki. Tristram Shandy 17:39, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)