-----Original Message----- From: Magnus Manske [mailto:Magnus.Manske@epost.de] Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 10:26 AM To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Simple XML ideas
I agree that the special namespaces should be distinguished 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?
I agree that changing the layout of the special pages will go a long way to solving this problem. But I also think we may want to add some text near the links to other namespaces, explaining things.
That said, I don't think just changing the color of the title is enough to make it immediately visually apparent that you are looking at a different kind of page. I think we need something visually bigger -- a slight change in the background color, or the addition of a subtle background image, or re-arranging the layout of special pages in a more obvious way.
Beyond that, I do think the text for the link to a Talk: namespace should be more descriptive. But, I also don't believe users need a longwinded description of the _concept_ of namespaces, to be able to grasp them, this is because people use namespaces intuitively all the time. ("Bob" means something different for me at work than it does at a family picnic.) What they need is visual cues which will help them to make use of this intuitive knowledge.
Yours Mark