Magnus-
Erik Moeller wrote:
See, because we have to make the wiki principles (reversion, watchlists, rc, diffs, attribution, protection, deletion, undeletion ...) work for any solution that is outside the article space, I prefer one that is simply part of the article space.
You have removed the part of my answer where I talked about undeleting...
True, because we can always add such functionality later. That's not the point. The point is that we should avoid reinventing the wiki whenever possible.
IMHO categories don't change the way articles do. An article about a city will be about a city as long as the article exists.
Certainly, but that is a very limited view of categories. In my scheme, you would also have
[[Category:City with population under 10]] [[Category:Large city]] - which could each be child categories of [[Category:City]], so if you specify one, you do not have to specify the other. You create a child category simply by putting [[Category:City]] on [[Category:Large city]]. [[Category:Cultural heritage site]] [[Category:Capital]] ...
and so on, which would be used to generate the respective list articles that are currently manually maintained. Within such a more comprehensive metadata framework, constant changes, debates about categorization etc. are inevitable. It makes sense to use articles/talk pages in the traditional sense.
I'm not sure how I feel about a meta namespace. I don't really see the need for it yet, but if this kind of metadata becomes too much, we might go for it. Note that if we do it, we need to do it for each of the existing namespaces.
No, the *code* is still there (SpecialInterwiki.php, IIRC). The test database was wiped, and that wouldn't have been in the CVS, unless I had explicitely put a copy of the database structure there.
That's why it's a good idea to create patch-files (see maintenance/ archive) whenever you change the database structure. It's a bit annoying, but prevents accidents like this.
Regards,
Erik