I checked a Help: namespace for en: into CVS.
As some of you may know, there is currently a user guide under development
on Meta. This user guide really belongs in its own namespace, which allows
us to easily export it and bundle it together with MediaWiki. It will also
be quite neat to have links like [[Help:Editing]], [[Help:Redirects]],
[[Help:Preferences]] etc.
However, I'm not sure where we should write the handbook. The problem is
internationalization. Meta is nominally multilingual, but it is a single
site. A single help: namespace on meta will only allow us to write one
language version.
Given the way the wikis are currently set up, without changing the
namespace system itself, I see no easy way to give Meta additional help:
namespaces in other languages without forking it from the common codebase.
So it seems to me that for reasons of internationalization, the handbook
should be written and maintained on the different language Wikipedias.
That also makes it easier to use interlanguage links, and to move existing
help page histories to the help namespace. The downside is that it is
illogical - the handbook is not specifically related to Wikipedia.
Are there any better ways to handle this within the current namespace
system?
Regards,
Erik