Timwi-
I completely disagree. Whoever said the MediaWiki
namespace was "for
running the software"?
The software is called MediaWiki. The namespace is called MediaWiki. But
it is used for purposes that have nothing to do with the software. That is
confusing (bad usability!) and should be changed.
There is really no significant added overhead in making it impossible to
create new MediaWiki: pages and having a separate Template: namespace. In
my opinion that is much more user-friendly and keeps interface
translation/adaption and content management separate.
Nick's idea of arbitrary inclusion requires some more discussion. It would
be more difficult to cache pages for inclusion. Right now we can load all
the articles in the MediWiki namespace into memcached, which is fairly
manageable. Once any article can be transcluded, we have to rely on the
database.
On the other hand, arbitraty inclusion would open some pretty neat
possibilities. It's very close to Ted Nelson's Xanadu visions. You could
start thinking about specifiers like {{include:Religion#2-}}, which would
include all sections except the intro from the religion article. Using
such mechanisms you could then build different views of an article (long,
detailed pages or smaller, more specific pages). Of course you'd also get
a whole barrel of new problems. Nevertheless, I think we should remain
open to the possibility while keeping caching in mind.
Regards,
Erik