On Dec 27, 2003, at 10:08 AM, Agon S. Buchholz wrote: I've noticed the same thing. And though the English Wikipedia has a decent page through the Policies and Guidelines that provides a partial list, it's still not always useful in connecting to all the appropriate pages. That's a very good idea; I'd be willing to pitch in and help out in rewriting/reorganizing some of that data. True, another namespace will add some more complication. But take a look at the following list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: List_of_articles_in_the_Wikipedia_namespace Not only is that a daunting amount of information for people like me who are trying to set up separate wiki sites with a new name, but it's also a job that is complicated by the fact that we have to go through and change all the internal links in the documentation to match our new namespace. If the documentation used a "Help:" namespace, then none of the links would have to be updated, and all an administrator of a new site would need to do would be to download the documentation database dump and upload it. And it would also help separate the site-specific pages (like Wikipedia:) from those "meta" type pages that are about how a user (that is, a site visitor) can operate the MediaWiki interface. Possibly, it would be a good idea to make it easy to change the name of the website in the documentation, or else make the distribution copy of the documentation vague so that it can apply to all sites. This would require some rewriting, but it probably wouldn't be as big a deal (either way). I had this idea to go along with it -- I don't know how feasible it is or whether the MW developers would want to use it, but... what if there were another variable added that can be included inline with the wiki text? I'm thinking of those items like "number of articles" or "current date" and so forth. If another one of those were the website name (already a variable for the web browser title bar), then the variable could be used in place of referring to the website in any documentation text, and thus would *automatically* be updated. I suppose this all assumes that the people who are using the software want to start out with the same established policies that Wikipedia currently uses, but from my perspective, that's exactly what I'm trying to do, at least in the initial stages of the site's growth. Thanks, Dan Carlson Administrator, Memory Alpha http://memoryalpha.st-minutiae.com/

Erik Moeller wrote: The Help: namespace seems to be a workable idea, but only for the more mechanical issues, and not for policy issues. At Wikisource there has been a demand for this sort of thing, and it would be helpful to be able to import a few files from one of the other projects. For the user it would be helpful to know that the same query format will achieve the same result on all the the projects. Perhaps too just typing "help:" (with the mandatory colon, at least in Wiktionary) in the search box and hitting "Go" would give a list of available help files. No. I expect that after the initial setup these may evolve differently in each project. Each should have its own "Help talk:" page. Meta would have the template page, and its talk page should be devoted to more general issues about the template. Regular exports after the initial one would be a problem when it is independently editable in each project. Certainly. Policies will diverge consderably more than mechanical instructions. Even NPOV, where there is a clear understanding that it should apply to all projects, can have different interpretations. It tends to be less of a problem in the non-encyclopedic projects, and instructions should deal with how it integrates with the vision of particular projects. Naming conventions will have even more variations. Ec