On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 11:23:47AM -0500, Dan Carlson wrote:
On Dec 27, 2003, at 10:08 AM, Agon S. Buchholz wrote:
True, another namespace will add some more complication. But take a
look at the following list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
List_of_articles_in_the_Wikipedia_namespace
Not only is that a daunting amount of information for people like me
who are trying to set up separate wiki sites with a new name, but it's
also a job that is complicated by the fact that we have to go through
and change all the internal links in the documentation to match our new
namespace. If the documentation used a "Help:" namespace, then none of
the links would have to be updated, and all an administrator of a new
site would need to do would be to download the documentation database
dump and upload it. And it would also help separate the site-specific
pages (like Wikipedia:) from those "meta" type pages that are about how
a user (that is, a site visitor) can operate the MediaWiki interface.
I for one support the creation of a Help: namespace. I can see how it would help other
users of the MediaWiki software, how
would it complicate things?
Documentation: might be a bit better than Help: as it might make more sense for Policy
pages and such. Or possibly not.
Possibly, it would be a good idea to make it easy to
change the name of
the website in the documentation, or else make the distribution copy of
the documentation vague so that it can apply to all sites. This would
require some rewriting, but it probably wouldn't be as big a deal
(either way).
I had this idea to go along with it -- I don't know how feasible it is
or whether the MW developers would want to use it, but... what if there
were another variable added that can be included inline with the wiki
text? I'm thinking of those items like "number of articles" or
"current date" and so forth. If another one of those were the website
name (already a variable for the web browser title bar), then the
variable could be used in place of referring to the website in any
documentation text, and thus would *automatically* be updated.
I imagine this variable would be almost trivial to add and would make the documentation
massively more portable. Who do I
have to buy a beer/bribe?
I suppose this all assumes that the people who are
using the software
want to start out with the same established policies that Wikipedia
currently uses, but from my perspective, that's exactly what I'm trying
to do, at least in the initial stages of the site's growth.
I think most of the policies are good places to start out for anyone considering running a
Wiki much less one using the
MediaWiki software.
- Jason