Steve Bennett wrote:
I eagerly await acceptance from those in the "don't move it" camp that it is in fact in the wrong namespace. Certainly, it's causing very little harm there. And moving it might cause more harm. But the only reason it is where it is is entirely historical.
If it solves this issue, I'm quite willing to write and commit a patch to MediaWiki that puts "Main Page" in a special little namespace of its own, all by itself. Need to clear it with Brion first, I suppose, but it does sound like a neat and simple solution to this problem. :-)
Seriously, namespaces are, except for some minor technical details and a few truly special cases like "Image:" and "Category:", merely arbitrary technical divisions of the flat, unstructured space of all possible page titles. Sure, it's convenient to have all non-article pages at titles that begin with something odd like "Wikipedia:", since that makes it less likely that they'll collide with the titles of actual articles. Note, however, that I wrote "less likely", not "impossible", as the category I mentioned elsewhere in this thread shows. And do also note that all those convenient little redirect pages we've been putting up at titles like "WP:WHATEVER" are equally conveniently out of the way, even though they're not technically in a separate namespace at all. If we did, in fact, some day decide to make "WP:" a real namespace, the only major thing that would change would be the names of the talk pages of those titles.
Anyway, my point is that, just like it's reasonably unlikely that we'll get too many articles about things whose name starts with "Wikipedia:" or "Template:", it's also reasonably unlikely that we'll end up with an article that ought to be titled "Main Page". Both are possible, of course, but we really shouldn't be bending over backwards trying to accommodate all the possible ways in which such a thing might happen before it has in fact actually happened.