[Mediawiki-l] Re: blog extension

[Rowan Collins]

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 00:18:40 +0100, FxParlant <f-x.p at laposte.net> wrote:

> I remembered why I just droped the idea of using namespaces in mediawiki
> (although I really used it a lot in Dokuwiki): I think that mediawiki
> just creates a "what links here" (links) table for the main namespace.

That's not true. Any page linking to any other page will create an
entry in the links table. In fact, the links table doesn't even
*record* which namespace the page is in, it just stores a pair of page
ids (cur_id). For an example of a whatlinkshere page demonstrating
that, see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Foo
 
> I thought I could simply change the mysql query of my extension, but it
> seems that it's the same with the "category links" table: only pages in
> the main namespace are taken into account.

Again, not true. In fact, some people are really rather annoyed that
category pages *don't* make any distinction between namespaces. In
this table, the link *target* is stored as a string, and is by
definition always in the Category namespace; but the link *source* can
be any page in the wiki.

So there's no reason [that I can think of] why your extension won't
work across namespaces. And no reason you couldn't add to your SQL
query so that the namespace of the pages could be specified, or a
default namespace used (by checking the value of cur_namespace).

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]