What I'm hoping for is that we will have information that is relevant, show up better than information that is no longer relevant, especially for users of mediawiki.org that are newer and less versed in the history, terminology and mechanics of MediaWiki. At the same time we would still have all information available to anyone more experienced and willing to look deeper, with a simple click of "All" in the search page.
DJ
On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 3:37 PM Thiemo Kreuz thiemo.kreuz@wikimedia.de wrote:
What are the benefits you are hoping for?
I understand that pages in the proposed namespace will not show up in search results any more, unless I specifically search in this namespace. While this can be beneficial, it can also have negative effects. If old pages are excluded users will often get seemingly incomplete or even empty results, thinking there is nothing to be found, or the internal search broken. Personally I rarely had issues with outdated pages polluting my search results. More the contrary. If old pages show up that's probably because I was searching for exactly that information.
I hope we are not going to hide this namespace from external search engines, as this would make this content largely inaccessible.
Another issue I see are broken links between pages. MediaWiki relies on one mechanism to make sure links between moved pages still work: redirects. These would need to stay behind. This can become a problem when people start deleting the redirects, or using them for other content.
Personally I'm really not sure if a namespace is the best possible solution. mediawiki.org is more a continuum of content we collected over the years. Pages are rarely up to date. It would probably be less cumbersome to consider the existing main namespace an "archive" and only mark pages that are known to be up to date.
Kind regards Thiemo _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/