On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 16:27, Jonathan Walther wrote:
On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 04:24:34PM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
I have changed my mind. Languages are definately namespaces. Talk about an English article can go in the en_Talk namespace. Users, Meta, etc, can all be non-lingual.
I would disagree. User pages should be available per-language as they are now. The namespace names also should be localizable, and must not be explicitly and forever tied to some particular foreign language (ie English). Special page names are English-only at the moment, and that is a deficiency that should be repaired.
I also propose only a single level of namespaces; none of this en:Image:foo stuff. If the image really needs to be "English" we can have an en_Image namespace, yielding en_Image:foo.
That's not an "english image", it's an english *image description* page. Description pages are text, which is in some language.
Wikipedia pages now have a 3level name structure: language (or meta or sep11), namespace (possibly empty), and title. What's wrong with this?
What's wrong is that it is unnecessary complexity. Can you give any reason why it has to be 3 levels, instead of 2? Having the three levels makes the coding tricky when you have pages that only need the two and are language independant.
Language has to be explicitly known so we can output Content-Language headers for browser config and search engine filtering; select the default user interface language to use, in some cases use a slightly different layout (right-to-left support?); select which bookseller links to use for ISBN links, etc.
If language and namespce are squished into one level, we would still need to have a language<->namespace map, both to get the language of a given page and to select pages in multiple namespace that belong to a language; this would also make it a lot harder to track certain kinds of pages across languages (ie, all talk pages; all user pages; all article pages) since we'd need a map of namespace to namespace functionality... which pretty much brings us back to square one -- the namespace-language key and namespace-functionality key would be functionally indentical to the distinct language and namespace keys. There may be some advantage to an extra level of indirection there, but I don't know what.
In a use where you only ever have one language/section, you'd just only ever _use_ one section. Just as you could run the current phase III software and only ever use pages in the "" namespace, it would sit in the background and you'd pay it no mind.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)