On 16/01/07, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
I see your point; if we're going to have to change its name, it's probably better to do it sooner rather than later.
I personally don't subscribe to the "OMG think of all the broken links" line of thinking. We wouldn't be silly enough to shift the Main Page and leave it a red link.
Sure, there'd be a redirect. Links won't break. The problem is that many of the objections implicitly assume that, at some point after this move, we'll replace the redirect, so that .../wiki/Main_Page will no longer take you to .../wiki/Portal:Portal (or whatever), it will now take you to .../wiki/Some_Movie
And at *that* point all our inbound links break.
I'm sympathetic to the hypothetical "and if we have a film by this name?", and I don't see a workable solution for it*, but even if we move the article to a different internal name I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of that URL ever pointing anywhere but the front page. And if I'm working from that point, I figure, why move the article at all? The "free up namespace" argument is moot, and the naming conventions one is just silly...
* Though for a book, I'd contend it really ought to be at [[Main page]]. Which prompts me to wonder if we have any standard capping convention for book titles, and if not why not... beyond the fact that the standard formal convention "looks silly".
I think the best thing to do would be to make a non-wiki-page portal for our front page, like we have for www.wikipedia.org. It would be editable from a MediaWiki page somewhere, but would be full HTML coding, so we could get rid of the Monobook skin for the front page, and put all our effort into making the front page the sort of page people would set as their home page.
A not entirely crazy proposal :-) But does the benefit of a unified look and feel outweigh its advantages?