Timwi- The software is called MediaWiki. The namespace is called MediaWiki. But it is used for purposes that have nothing to do with the software. That is confusing (bad usability!) and should be changed. There is really no significant added overhead in making it impossible to create new MediaWiki: pages and having a separate Template: namespace. In my opinion that is much more user-friendly and keeps interface translation/adaption and content management separate. Nick's idea of arbitrary inclusion requires some more discussion. It would be more difficult to cache pages for inclusion. Right now we can load all the articles in the MediWiki namespace into memcached, which is fairly manageable. Once any article can be transcluded, we have to rely on the database. On the other hand, arbitraty inclusion would open some pretty neat possibilities. It's very close to Ted Nelson's Xanadu visions. You could start thinking about specifiers like {{include:Religion#2-}}, which would include all sections except the intro from the religion article. Using such mechanisms you could then build different views of an article (long, detailed pages or smaller, more specific pages). Of course you'd also get a whole barrel of new problems. Nevertheless, I think we should remain open to the possibility while keeping caching in mind. Regards, Erik

Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)Wikipedia.org> writes: If you did implement this feature, as you build up the page you *would* have to watch for circular references. You could do this by stacking the fully qualified names of what your in the middle of including and make sure the new file isn't already on the stack. You should really do this anyway if there is nested inclusion now. Marking an article as includable is a thought, but how would you do that? You could restrict your inclusion to a special "Templates" name space, but that would not be as powerful. I don't think that would be necessary, unless there are caching considerations. Nick Pisarro

On Thursday 26 February 2004 21:11, Timwi wrote: Or you could do something similar to redirects, allow only one level of inclusion.

Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)Wikipedia.org> writes: These suggestions would allow the greatest range of flexibility. This might be the key to resolving most of the objections to this idea. I'll put together a design document of {incl...} idea on meta.wikipedia and include some of this discussion. Nick Pisarro