On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 17:57:38 +0100, Tomer Chachamu the.r3m0t@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I think the most "surprising" kind of link is "[[Media:...]]", because it doesn't link to any page at all. OTOH, I
That is also a problem. I would want the namespace to be called "Media", but with the translated name as "Image" for help during transition.
Well, no, those do two different things - one links to the *description*, one directly to the file itself (this is what I meant by it not linking to any page at all), so [[Media:]] would not now be a good replacement for [[Image:]] as both are already in use. Looking ahead at the needs of a more multimedia-oriented scheme, one could envisage a whole set of ways of referencing the information. For instance:
* [[File:...]] could be the name of the actual description pages, so links to [[File:Foo.jpeg]] would be equivalent to [[:Image:Foo.jpeg]], and things that weren't images wouldn't seem so oddly named (you would no longer see bold headings saying "Image:Foo.ogg"). * [[Image:...]] could continue to function as at present (i.e. magic syntax with an increasing number of display options) * Similar magic syntaxes such as [[Audio:...]] or [[Sound:..]], [[Video:..]], or maybe just [[AV:...]], could generate some kind of user-selectable embedded player (I think that's discussed briefly at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia) * [[Media:...]] would be less necessary with proper sound and video markup, but would have to remain in the code for backwards compatibility. * Also for backwards compatibility, [[:Image:...]] would have to be special-cased as an alias for [[File:...]] (i.e. a link to the description page); to avoid confusion, any new "magic namespaces", such as [[Sound:..]], etc, would have to have similar "escaped" versions ([[:Sound:...]], etc)
That's quite a radical set of changes, I know, but I think it covers all the problems with the current system without breaking existing content. Of course, it makes the syntax even more "magic" and different for different cases, which is what you were suggesting we avoid. We could, I guess, store what kind of media each file is (Image / Sound / Video / other?) leaving us with only 3 distinct cases ("use" file, mention description, mention file directly) - and with good enough support for the first, the third becomes much less needed - but nothing elegant immediately comes to mind even then.
(This is similar to the "Project" and "Wikipedia" namespaces: The first is new in an attempt to disassociate MediaWiki from Wikipedia, and "Wikipedia" is an alias on Wikipedia sites for it. You can have two names for the same namespace.)
Actually, that's not quite correct. Every namespace has *exactly 2* names, one of which is "canonical" (available on every installation, regardless of configuration and language) and one which is local (varying according to content language and configuration settings). The namespace with the canonical name "Project:" has its local name set to the name of the project at installation (so, for Wikipedia sites, it is "Wikipedia:" or some local variation, such as "Vikipedio:"; for Wiktionaries, it is "Wiktionary:"). The "Project:" prefix is never actually treated as the "real" name of the page (it never appears as the heading), it's just there so you can create links without knowing the target language/configuration.
That's not to say it's *impossible* to have a redundant name built in purely for backwards compatibility, I just wanted to be clear that the software doesn't *currently* support such a thing.
That is exactly my point. The "Template" namespace is intended for templates, so linking to it with [[Template:Box]] is a *use* of it, not a *mention*. Mentions should be relegated to using a colon as in [[:Template:Box]] as currently with images and categories.
The template namespace is intended for use exclusively in inclusions, but inclusions are *not* intended exclusively for the template namespace. This is a design decision, to be sure, but it *is* one people have taken advantage of.
Such as what? I cannot see the disadvantage to putting these pages in the Template namespace.
Off the top of my head, transclusion has been used to: * create utility pages which are seperated by day or topic, but which can also be viewed as one page; the transcluded pages in this case being sub-pages of the "main" one (examples include "Votes for Deletion" and the archives of the "Wikipedia Signpost" newspaper); you _could_ put the individual parts in the Template: namespace, but this would seem forced, as they are designed to also be viewed on their own * create templates "for personal use" as sub-pages of a User: page; this is particularly useful with the substitution syntax, for things like adding a message to a User_talk: page; there are other examples like this, too, where it simply makes more sense to have them sorted with associated content, rather than "cluttering up" the global set of templates in the Template: namespace. * wrap encyclopedia articles in additional information, to create slide-show / "guided tour" sequences [e.g. "<intro><previous_link><next_link> {{:Article}} <previous_link><next_link>"]; this currently suffers from problems with inheritance of categories, interlanguage links, etc, but is an example of a use that would be not just inconvenient but completely impossible if all transclusions had to be from pages in the Template: namespace.
Also, a secondary syntax could be made, like that old {{msg:}} syntax. {{msg:Box}} would include [[Box]], not [[Template:Box]].
Surely that defeats the whole object of the exercise, which was to "rationalise" the syntax. Either inclusion requires its own syntax, so that it can reference any page, or no inclusions from non-template pages can be made; to have both at once is just asking for confusion.
One thing I haven't been able to decide is what the new substitution syntax would be. I was considering ~[[Template:Box]] (thinking this would be one in a set of substitutions, i.e. along with ~~~3 ~~~~4 and
If you were to go down that route, I would suggest something more along the lines [[~Template:Box]], because the tilde ('~') in your example doesn't look very "connected" to the link syntax. Enclosing tildes, like ~[[Template:Box]]~, might be better as well; of course, you'd have people wondering why ~[[User:IMSoP/foo]]~ didn't do anything...
I don't like the implied template namespace. {{:Box}} for the article is not exactly intuitive.
No, I agree that that is kind of confusing, but since this is currently the only thing that's special about the Template namespace, it does make sense - as you say, inclusion from the main namespace is a lot rarer. Actually, the problem is arguably the existence of a nameless namespace - I'm not suggesting we get rid of it, but the only reason {{:Box}} has to be so unintuitive is that there's nothing obvious you can put on the front to say "in the article namespace". If we were designing a wiki from scratch, with no legacy users or content, it would be worth at least considering the different design concept of every namespace being named, but links defaulting to within the *same* namespace (as though each namespace was more like a seperate wiki).