I would actually suggest that we try somehow to change the "look and feel" of the special namespaces, so that people will just SEE the distinction as they browse through our site.
I think that's what is bugging me about the "()", in a way. Talk pages are not just a variant of encyclopedia articles, they're something else entirely, even though they use the same interface and syntax. The hardwired ":" character makes a clear distinction between the pages types, while "()" does not. There are already some articles with "()" in the name, and I'm afraid the talk, wikipedia and user pages would blend into each other again if we stop using the ":".
The fundamental problem I have with using () both to disambiguate terms within the wikipedia, and to denote special pages which are not encyclopedia articles, is that we don't want people to accidentally miss this distinction and start using the standard encyclopedia article namespace for user pages, or for talking about articles, etc.
I agree that the special namespaces should be distingushed more from the encyclopedia pages. Again, this is more a layout problem than anything else. How about marking the namespace part of the title in red, of italics?
The namespace display should also be updated. The link to the Talk namespace should probably get a special position, or an icon or something.
I think Larry agrees with me that hardwireing is a *good* thing to sepetate the actual articles from the "surrounding" pages. That was *one* of the reasons we made meta.wikipedia.com, right?
Magnus