I checked a Help: namespace for en: into CVS.

As some of you may know, there is currently a user guide under development on Meta. This user guide really belongs in its own namespace, which allows us to easily export it and bundle it together with MediaWiki. It will also be quite neat to have links like [[Help:Editing]], [[Help:Redirects]], [[Help:Preferences]] etc.

However, I'm not sure where we should write the handbook. The problem is internationalization. Meta is nominally multilingual, but it is a single site. A single help: namespace on meta will only allow us to write one language version.

Given the way the wikis are currently set up, without changing the namespace system itself, I see no easy way to give Meta additional help: namespaces in other languages without forking it from the common codebase.

So it seems to me that for reasons of internationalization, the handbook should be written and maintained on the different language Wikipedias. That also makes it easier to use interlanguage links, and to move existing help page histories to the help namespace. The downside is that it is illogical - the handbook is not specifically related to Wikipedia.

Are there any better ways to handle this within the current namespace system?

Regards,

Erik