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.
--
Ilmari Karonen