I have only seen these on en: so far, but other wikis may also have encountered them -- "/temp" pages which are used to develop a new version of an article. These are frequently generated in the article namespace, and often left there to linger forever by those who created them. Often deletion is problematic because their current status is unclear -- how much time should someone be given to work on a temp page?
Having these in the article namespace exposes them to standard searches, uses our article color etc. Subpages are also not supported for the article namespace, so that backlinks to the main article are not generated. I see two alternatives:
- Move them to a [[User:foo/bar]] subpage of the user who created them - Move them to [[Talk:article/temp]] of the article's talk page.
There may be the option of a "Temp:" namespace, but that would probably fill up with nonsense too quickly.
What do you think? I think I prefer the Talk: option and will probably start moving this stuff unless there are objections. IMHO keeping them where they are right now is not an option for a serious encyclopedia.
Regards,
Erik