[Commons-l] Killing the main namespace?

[Brianna Laugher]

On 29/01/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I see a lot of misplaced pages, spam, and utter insanity appear in the
> main namespace on commons.  There is also a lot of confusion about how
> the main namespace should be used.
>
> What do you think of the idea of moving all the galleries to a
> gallery: namespace, then reserving the main namespace for main pages
> and pretty much nothing else. After that point we could prevent main
> namespace page creation and make the edit page give a nice "You are
> confused, here is how you find help" message.
>
> The work it would take to accomplish this could be completely
> automated, although some inter project cooperation would be required
> to fix gallery linking templates and the like.
>
> I see a lot of potential to reduce confusion, and not a lot of real
> downsides. So I must be missing something. Thoughts?

It seems unnecessary to me. My feeling is that our mainspace spam is
only overly visible due to the facts that (a) we allow anon editors to
start articles (and I hope we continue to), and (b) we have very few
Special:Newpages patrollers (I have a look from time to time, I know
Herbythyme has been doing quite a lot lately).

I think changing the main namespace tab name to 'gallery' has been a
great change. What makes you say that "There is also a lot of
confusion about how
> the main namespace should be used"?

Perhaps all we need is more admins deleting namespace crud. I delete
on sight 99%  of anything that is only text. Even if it's in another
language. A lot of them look like misplaced articles or promo bios.

regards,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise