WikiIndex talk:New page for yourself

Namespace

I am liking the emerging convention of having a front level namespace attached to a link to you user talk page. MarkDilley

It's a little unusual though actually. The conventional convention :-) on MediaWiki sites, is to have user pages under the 'User' namespace. It's less easy to link to, which I guess is why you're preferring the CamelCase wiki way.

The advantage is that user pages are separate from other articles. This is handy if the wiki gets big, or if people are allowed to use nicknames, which might then get confused for real articles. It's essential on big wikis such as Wikipedia, but might also be useful here, since we have quite a lot of obscure page names in the main namespace, even without user nicknames muddled in. I think for those of us using real names, it's less of an issue, but the question is, should we tell all new joiners to do it this way? Setting up the redirects is a little messy too -- Harry Wood 15:16, 29 Jan 2006 (EST)

Harry, when I got here, I proposed using the main namespace only for wikis, and using the user space for editors and the WikiIndex: space for meta conversations. What I came to understand is that users are part of the main space in this case because the process is part of the product. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, so users clearly don't belong in the main space. Here, we're all wiki people. Hence, we're part of the subject matter, the output, of this place. And the meta conversations are also part of the output, actually. At least that's how I come to understand it now. TedErnst | talk 19:49, 29 Jan 2006 (EST)

I agree with Harry and with what Ted used to believe!! But we can go with the flow, although as this is a wiki of wikis and I'm not a wiki you won't find me creating a main namespace page about me. However, some of the description pages need correcting. robinp 17:15, 22 Mar 2006 (EST)

So if I've understood you correctly, users can use any title for their user pages, not necessarily their username? In my opinion, it would make more sense to keep all user pages in the User namespace, since it is less confusing for newbies (who know Wikipedia or other MediaWiki wikis) and helps searching for users, since you can limit your search to the User namespace. --Denise 06:04, 30 May 2007 (EDT)

You are correct about naming your page, and we really encourage the use of real names here. This wiki was originally intended to be as much about wiki people as it is about wiki sites, and if you navigate to category: Wiki People, you will see that. The path that most of us have taken is to create our personal pages in the main namespace and to redirect our user page(s) to the main namespace page. You can see that on my page, John Stanton, and you can see that pictures are also encouraged. If you choose to put a picture up, we will eventually generate a digital caricatures by the very talented Rhoda Grossman. To have a caricature generated make sure you have a [[Category:NeedsCharicature]] tag on your page. John 22:32, 30 May 2007 (EDT)

This is crazy

This makes no sense. If you start from the main page, every human is being invited to make a page here for them-self. Fortunately, most of them have declined the invite... We need a discussion of the guidelines about who would be appropriate to be here. And under what conditions, if any, anyone else should create or edit an article about someone else. WP teaches us that this will be a giant can of worms, if this website ever becomes a success. Are the admins prepared to cope with this? What are you thinking? --69.87.193.65 05:40, 2 February 2007 (PST)

Wikipedia is a wiki about encyclopedic information. This is a wiki about wikis, wiki ideas and wiki people. Don't think of this wiki and it software in the way that you think about Wikipedia. There are namespaces here because of the software, not because of the need for them. MarkDilley