The 100-199ish range has for years been the standard convention for site-specific custom namespaces -- any extension hardcoding in that range does so at its own risk, and for instance can't be deployed on existing Wikimedia sites which already put their site-specific namespaces there.

The best thing to do though is to remove the requirement to worry about namespace numbers at all; just as we don't need to enforce any special rules about page and revision id numbers, they should be managed internally to the wiki's database and not enforce any particular meaning on their own.

There was some prelim work on this a few years ago ('Namespace Manager') and the idea gets brought up again; here's a recent bugzilla entry which should be a good place to start hanging that:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31063

-- brion

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 3:18 AM, Gregor Hagedorn g.m.hagedorn@gmail.comwrote:

I agree with Daniel on the mechanics of failed communication, and think any blaming of either side is wrong as well as counterproductive.

However, I think the basic request to NOW communicate widely which namespace range should be reserved for site-specific purposes is very reasonable.

Of course their will be not contract, but the present situation is unsatisfactorily. On http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_default_namespaces their is no recommendation where to set up your site-specific namespaces. The page says that 100-199 is often used, and extensions should avoid it, but actually some of the most important extensions happily invent their namespaces there.

I don't believe it has to be a 100-block, but a clear commication to all devs: in the future, at all cost, avoid x-y would be welcome.

Gregor

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