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with outdated pages polluting my search results.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
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