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. [[User:Tristram Shandy|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 [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Special_page 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. [[User:Tristram Shandy|Tristram Shandy]] 17:39, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)