On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 17:57:38 +0100, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t(a)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
~~~~~5.
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).
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]