Jim Hu wrote:
What I was worried about was not the prefixing, but rather that MW would someday change the schema to include a table called tableEditTableName, to use your example. The probability of this happening is admittedly low, but is higher for the possible names that are most obvious in describing the functions of the tables.
I'd like to see a recommended standard from the Mediawiki developers that have an official convention for naming bits of extensions that are guaranteed not to clash with MW bits. For example, if all table names for extensions start with "e_", then you might have two extensions clashing but never have an extension clash with a MW table. Hence the full name will be the database prefix concatenated with "e_" concatenated with the table name.
I you want to get further carried away, perhaps a second bit that tries to encode the extension initials or something.
If we want to keep separate extension developers from clashing, it could be possible to add some info to a specific table on every extension page in mediawiki.org so that these things are identified. Something that groups the info by extension (something like Extension Matrix) could create a searchable page (via your browser's text search functions) to use as a kind of data dictionary.
Mike