I am setting up a mediawiki to use for 2 main purposes:
1. a wikipedia on a specialized topic (in community sustainable development) 2. a forum for public consultations, where information will be posted and the public given a chance to provide feedback and hold discussions
Looking at how wikipedia.org is set up, I am wondering if I should hold the wikipedia in the blank namespace and the public consultations in the "portal" namespace? Or will uneducated users forget to include the "portal:" when creating new internal links in the consultations area, so I should put both 1 and 2 in the blank namespace? Or should I create a new namespace, like "casestudy"?
Never having set up a wiki before, I'm just don't have an intuition on how these decisions will turn out once many people are using the wiki, and I suspect it could be very hard to change later.
Many thanks, Levi
I thought I'd give some thoughts on this, but I'm afraid they may not amount to much more than one man's vague ramblings. Feel free to ignore if you're pressed for time ;)
On 19/10/05, Levi Waldron wrote:
a wikipedia on a specialized topic (in community sustainable development)
a forum for public consultations, where information will be posted
and the public given a chance to provide feedback and hold discussions
From the way you describe it, I'm inclined to think that these *could*
be all in one namespace, as they are all basically the "primary business" of the wiki. Remember that wikis in general were conceived as vehicles for discussion as well as collaborating on an "end product". The reason Wikipedia divided the two roles is so that it could prevent a "pretty face" to readers outside the community - so discussions about particular pages were put in a "Talk:" namespace, and wider discussions and policies in a "Wikipedia:" ("Project:") namespace.
Or, depending how well these things map, you could perhaps use the existing "discussion" namespace to discuss the *topic* of each "article", rather than just the content of the article itself. But you mention "case studies", which maybe would be conceptually different from general topics within the field, in which case putting them in a "Case study" namespace might make sense.
Oh, and as for people forgetting to type prefixes, remember that they're always displayed in the title at the top of the page, so I think it's pretty easy to get used to "Case study:Foo" being a different page from "Foo", just as it's different from "Foo (case study)" or any other convention. And case studies, if that's what they'd be, are unlikely to be linked with "accidental linking" in mid-sentence (as in "the [[dog]] ate the [[hat]]") because you're generally referring to the specific document, not the concept. So your key concepts could stay in the main namespace, and be linked to nice and easily, but case studies could be kept apart as something conceptually different.
Never having set up a wiki before, I'm just don't have an intuition on how these decisions will turn out once many people are using the wiki, and I suspect it could be very hard to change later.
Well, on the optimist side of that, Wikipedia started off without namespaces, because they hadn't been invented yet, and moved content into the right namespaces later. And if your wiki grows to the point where it's a lot of work to do all the renaming, you'll have a fair userbase there to help do it :)
PS: Just a quick note, that "Wikipedia" is a trademark, signifying the Wikipedia.org website[s] and nothing else; the generic term is simply "wiki", although I guess that's not specific enough for your meaning here. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/Names (which hopefully won't make you even more confused).
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]
On 10/19/05 2:21 PM, "Rowan Collins" rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
- a wikipedia on a specialized topic (in community sustainable development)
PS: Just a quick note, that "Wikipedia" is a trademark, signifying the Wikipedia.org website[s] and nothing else; the generic term is simply "wiki", although I guess that's not specific enough for your meaning here. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/Names (which hopefully won't make you even more confused).
-- Rowan Collins BSc
Defending trademarks is tough :-) "Hey, Joe, grab me a kleenex and a coke!"
The OP's meaning appears to be "a wiki based on MediaWiki", so perhaps "a mediawiki" would be good. "MediaWiki" is not quite a trademark yet if I understand http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trademark#MediaWiki correctly.
-- Joshua
On 19/10/05, Joshua Yeidel yeidel@wsu.edu wrote:
Defending trademarks is tough :-) "Hey, Joe, grab me a kleenex and a coke!"
But important, I think, hence the quick note.
The OP's meaning appears to be "a wiki based on MediaWiki", so perhaps "a mediawiki" would be good. "MediaWiki" is not quite a trademark yet if I understand http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trademark#MediaWiki correctly.
Actually, I read it as "a wiki with encyclopedia-like content", as opposed to the more forum/discussion oriented area of the site - note that he used it to refer to one part of the wiki, not the whole. Wikipedia was, as far as I know, the first to use a wiki to present "polished" content in this way, so with such an easily-understood name it's an obvious temptation to use it like that...
Interestingly, he did also use "a mediawiki", but since it is in fact an instance of MediaWiki that wouldn't be much of a violation even if it *were* considered a trademark ("a MediaWiki wiki" would presumably be preferred, but it's a whole lot better than using "a mediawiki" to mean an install of, say, FlexWiki...)
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]
Thank you for your inputs. As suggested, what I'm working on is a wiki based on mediawiki, one component of which will be an encyclopedic-type collection of sustainable development terminology, another which will be a case studies database. I think I will create a case_studies namespace for the case studies, since I like logical organizational separations of data and there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason not to do so.
It hadn't even occured to me that the term might be trademarked - thanks for the heads-up. So I will avoid using the term 'wikipedia' - perhaps a wiki-glossary? Doesn't have the same ring to it though I must say :).
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