On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Jan Hidders wrote:
How about user friendliness? Is that not a good reason? But the names was only one point. What matters is that it should be either obvious or easy to explain why these links are there an what they mean. I believe we can do better than this.
I think your solution is actually less user-friendly. We simply need to retain namespaces (they work fine, for the most part) and provide unique, user-friendly templates (I guess) for pages in different namespaces. E.g., talk pages could have one frame color and set of links--even font. Wikipedia pages could have a different frame color, and of course different links. User pages and special pages, ditto. The user should have the experience of being in different *parts* of the website, even though the thing is run from the same database. That's what's going to constitute a real improvement in useability. Making the page names all the same format doesn't constitute a significant improvement in user friendliness at all, that I can see. It's a decided disimprovement insofar as we use ":" to indicate namespaces and thus website page function, and we use "(...)" to disambiguate similarly-named topics.
Larry