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)
