On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 4:24 PM, S Page spage@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 3:01 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Flow has a new namespace: Topic. It has an even namespace number by default: 2600.
Talk pages till now have had odd numbers, and some scripts relied on that.
And that is still the case. For example, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Search is a Flow-enabled talk page, and its wgNamespaceNumber is 1.
So it's still a reasonable assumption that the talk page for a page is in the odd namespace N+1. Now the topics that appear on every Flow board page are in this special Topic: namespace and that is not odd but 2600. But this is not the talk namespace for the regular pages in namespace 2599, it's a specialized namespace like Graph or Worfklow. A Flow topic like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Savgw0ltqlin3m69 is not the talk page of anything.
I don't think there's a technical difficulty in making NS_TOPIC odd, but it's implying things that aren't so and I'm not sure what the win is.
See also https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Associated_namespaces (it might be related because once we have more than a single namespace associated to a given namespace, the parity of its ID might not be that much relevant anymore...)
Helder