Hi,
Flow has a new namespace: Topic. It has an even namespace number by default: 2600.
Talk pages till now have had odd numbers, and some scripts relied on that. For example, a project to analyze usage of Hebrew online used this, um, feature to identify whether the page being analyzed is in a content namespace or a talking namespace.
I'd argue that it's wrong to do it in the first place, because pages like Village Pump are in an even-numbered namespace, and their content is closer to talk pages than to content pages. Also, a program that wants to handle Flow posts will probably need APIs and queries that are different from those that are needed for handling old-style wiki pages in any case.
But still, I'll ask to be on the safe side: Does anybody know how prevalent that is? Is anybody else familiar with scripts, gadgets or extensions that rely on this?
(No, this is not an April fools joke. Really, it isn't. Yes, I admit that it sounds a lot like xkcd 1172. And like WP:BEANS. But no, it's not an April fools joke.)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
On Apr 2, 2015 7:01 AM, "Amir E. Aharoni" amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hi,
Flow has a new namespace: Topic. It has an even namespace number by default: 2600.
Liquid threads did the same thing. Afaik nothing bad happened (although i think its important to have namespace 2601 defined, even if unused).
--bawolff
Liquid threads did the same thing. Afaik nothing bad happened (although i think its important to have namespace 2601 defined, even if unused).
My recollection is - and please correct me if I'm wrong!! - that there was some intention that LiquidThreads would become the default for all discussion pages on Wikimedia sites, but this intention started wearing off around 2011. It became the discussion page technology for Wikinews in some languages, for translatewiki, for some pages on mediawiki.org and for some other minor areas. Were these ever the target of handling for any scripts or gadgets? Not that I know, but I don't know everything.
Flow seems to be progressing much better than LiquidThreads did, and the intention to make it default for all Wikimedia sites some day is there. So scripts and gadgets that currently handle talk pages will have to handle Flow pages. Will it be a big deal because of the namespace number? Possibly not, but I figured that I'll mention this.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2015-04-02 15:56 GMT+03:00 Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com:
On Apr 2, 2015 7:01 AM, "Amir E. Aharoni" amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hi,
Flow has a new namespace: Topic. It has an even namespace number by default: 2600.
Liquid threads did the same thing. Afaik nothing bad happened (although i think its important to have namespace 2601 defined, even if unused).
--bawolff _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 3:01 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Flow has a new namespace: Topic. It has an even namespace number by default: 2600.
Talk pages till now have had odd numbers, and some scripts relied on that.
And that is still the case. For example, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Search is a Flow-enabled talk page, and its wgNamespaceNumber is 1.
So it's still a reasonable assumption that the talk page for a page is in the odd namespace N+1. Now the topics that appear on every Flow board page are in this special Topic: namespace and that is not odd but 2600. But this is not the talk namespace for the regular pages in namespace 2599, it's a specialized namespace like Graph or Worfklow. A Flow topic like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Savgw0ltqlin3m69 is not the talk page of anything.
I don't think there's a technical difficulty in making NS_TOPIC odd, but it's implying things that aren't so and I'm not sure what the win is.
Also, a program that wants to handle Flow posts will probably need APIs and queries that are different from those that are needed for handling old-style wiki pages in any case.
Yes, some documentation at [2] and [3]. There's been discussion whether to make existing naive operations like "Add a new section to this talk page" or "Add a comment or category to this talk page" Do The Right Thing on a talk page that's actually a Flow board. See [1] and its phab tasks; the consensus is tools need to understand they're dealing with a Flow board to make the right choices. Anyway, neither of those actions make sense on an individual Flow topic.
But still, I'll ask to be on the safe side: Does anybody know how prevalent that is? Is anybody else familiar with scripts, gadgets or extensions that rely on this?
I don't know. It depends how tools discover a page in the Topic namespace and decide to operate on it.
(No, this is not an April fools joke. Really, it isn't. Yes, I admit that it sounds a lot like xkcd 1172. And like WP:BEANS. But no, it's not an April fools joke.)
We have some time to figure this out, all talk pages are being converted to Flow boards on May 8th. (Am I too late? :-) )
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Architecture/API#Should_existing_API_cal... [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Architecture/API#Use_cases [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Flow/API
On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 4:24 PM, S Page spage@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 3:01 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Flow has a new namespace: Topic. It has an even namespace number by default: 2600.
Talk pages till now have had odd numbers, and some scripts relied on that.
And that is still the case. For example, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Search is a Flow-enabled talk page, and its wgNamespaceNumber is 1.
So it's still a reasonable assumption that the talk page for a page is in the odd namespace N+1. Now the topics that appear on every Flow board page are in this special Topic: namespace and that is not odd but 2600. But this is not the talk namespace for the regular pages in namespace 2599, it's a specialized namespace like Graph or Worfklow. A Flow topic like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Savgw0ltqlin3m69 is not the talk page of anything.
I don't think there's a technical difficulty in making NS_TOPIC odd, but it's implying things that aren't so and I'm not sure what the win is.
See also https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Associated_namespaces (it might be related because once we have more than a single namespace associated to a given namespace, the parity of its ID might not be that much relevant anymore...)
Helder
2015-04-02 21:24 GMT+02:00 S Page spage@wikimedia.org:
And that is still the case. For example, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Search is a Flow-enabled talk page, and its wgNamespaceNumber is 1.
Ahhrgh, I have just looked at this page for the first time, and I am terribíl disappointed from this new-style date fashion "2 months" ago. I know this is not the right thread for this, I am just not familiar with the Flow production system. Who has decided that Wikipedians are unable to calculate how long ago a mont was? Exact dates have powerful meaning, they are valuable information, and substituting them with these dummy pseudo-dates hides information and makes Wikipedians feel themselves dummy. I noticed thet thre real date appears under the mouse but it is an extra effort, and the ouse can only be above one date at a time. Please somebody rethink this thing and don't punish us because of some actual silly trends!
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 4:05 AM, Bináris wikiposta@gmail.com wrote:
Ahhrgh, I have just looked at this page for the first time, and I am terribíl disappointed from this new-style date fashion "2 months" ago. I know this is not the right thread for this, I am just not familiar with the Flow production system. Who has decided that Wikipedians are unable to calculate how long ago a mont was? Exact dates have powerful meaning, they are valuable information, and substituting them with these dummy pseudo-dates hides information and makes Wikipedians feel themselves dummy. I noticed thet thre real date appears under the mouse but it is an extra effort, and the ouse can only be above one date at a time. Please somebody rethink this thing and don't punish us because of some actual silly trends!
See also: * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T93437 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94353 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94648
Helder
On 04/02/2015 03:01 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
I'd argue that it's wrong to do it in the first place, because pages like Village Pump are in an even-numbered namespace, and their content is closer to talk pages than to content pages.
Yes, this is exactly why NS_TOPIC is conceptually neither a subject page (Wikipedia:Village pump) nor a talk page (Wikipedia talk:Village pump).
NS_TOPIC is a component of (one, but in the future one or more) Flow boards. That Flow board could be a subject page (Wikipedia:Village pump or Wikipedia:Articles for deletion) or a discussion page (Talk:Earth).
Matt Flaschen
FYI after I saved a comment on mw:Talk:Sandbox: * {{TALKSPACE}} returns "" (wrong, it should be "Talk") * {{SUBJECTSPACE}} returns "Topic" (wrong again, it should be "") https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Sf6vh1zdy6n4ypjk&actio... I created a task at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T95681.
On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 12:57 AM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 04/02/2015 03:01 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
I'd argue that it's wrong to do it in the first place, because pages like Village Pump are in an even-numbered namespace, and their content is closer to talk pages than to content pages.
Yes, this is exactly why NS_TOPIC is conceptually neither a subject page (Wikipedia:Village pump) nor a talk page (Wikipedia talk:Village pump).
NS_TOPIC is a component of (one, but in the future one or more) Flow boards. That Flow board could be a subject page (Wikipedia:Village pump or Wikipedia:Articles for deletion) or a discussion page (Talk:Earth).
Matt Flaschen
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