en: Firefoxman wrote: I can't see why anyone would support such a move. I have yet to see a good argument for moving it. -Rich

On 14/01/07, en: Firefoxman <enwpmail(a)gmail.com> wrote: ...something we ourselves invented and applied. We're writing an encyclopedia here. We're working for the convenience of our readers and editors. We're not attempting to work on a giant self-consistent logical proof; we're not writing a legal system or playing a game of nomic. If a "rule" for articles conflicts with the sensible thing to do for the encyclopedia, we ignore the rule. I am amazed people fall over themselves to comply with constraints that simply don't matter. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 1/14/07, en: Firefoxman <enwpmail(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't see why that's a problem. It is the 'Main Page', not the entire encyclopedia, after all. -Matt

It seems to me that if the Main Page could be simultaneously located at [[Main Page]], [[Main page]], [[Wikipedia:Main Page]] and [[Portal:Main Page]], everyone would be happy. Now if only we had some kind of 'redirect' system to make these all show the same page, and a bit of code to hide the title so the difference was invisible to the reader, we could do this. Oh, wait, we can. And we already do. -Gurch

On 15/01/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote: The rules are NPOV, NOR and V. Everything else is commentary. - d.

Oskar Sigvardsson wrote: No, but it often should. Really, what should be done is make an exception to our namespace policy/guideline for things like this. -Jeff

Occam's Razor, Llama. For all we know Oskar could have multiple personalities. That could easily explain his use of the word 'we' in this context. Mgm ;) On 1/16/07, PeruvianLlama <peruvianllama(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Andrew Gray wrote: In a well ordered universe aesthetic sensitivities will occasionally be offended by irregular procedures. Sounds like an exciting game of [[Whac-A-Mole]]. Ec

On 15/01/07, en: Firefoxman <enwpmail(a)gmail.com> wrote: Which specific part of [[WP:NAME]] is it in violation of? Could you please point us to it? Even if there is such a provision in the naming conventions, the Main Page is much too important for any such prior decision (by a handful of people to institute such a convention) to stick without first consulting a much broader cross-section of the project. The Main Page has been at its current title since January 2002. Before that it was called "HomePage", and was also in the main namespace, as were all user pages (and all talk pages, as subpages). There were no namespaces. What is the rationale for shifting the Main Page out of the main namespace? Is there something else called "Main Page" that deserves an article that is currently missing out? Is there a technical inability to produce main-namespace-only article dumps that do not include the Main Page? Or is it just the same old pedantry? I look eagerly forward to your response. ~Mark Ryan

On 15/01/07, PeruvianLlama <peruvianllama(a)gmail.com> wrote: (snip) (snip) 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. 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. ~Mark Ryan

PeruvianLlama wrote: So we move it to, what, "Wikipedia:Main Page"? "Portal:Main Page"? But what shall we do when something comes along that deserves _that_ title? See also: [[Category:Articles whose titles conflict with an existing namespace]]. -- Ilmari Karonen

Steve Bennett wrote: Certainly, but it rather begs the question: to _what_? Of course, we don't really need to rename _all_ namespaces. All we need to do is rename {{ns 0}} and all these problems will be solved for good. :-) -- Ilmari Karonen

PeruvianLlama wrote: Really? And what happens when D***** B***** publishes his best-selling book titled "Wikipedia: The True Story"? Or perhaps he'll be a bit more creative, and calls it, say, "Wikipedia: Reliable sources". Or maybe "Wikipedia: Ignore all rules". :-) Naming a book "Wikipedia: Main Page" might be a bit of a stretch, but I guess if the publisher thinks it'll sell... -- Ilmari Karonen

Steve Bennett wrote: 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