[Mediawiki-l] Namespace recommendations for using MW in university courses

[Rob Church]

On 25/01/07, Christopher Fuhrman <christopher.fuhrman at etsmtl.ca> wrote:I
> 1) From what I understand about MW software, there are only 16 name spaces
> allowed, and my department has more than 30 courses. Assuming every
> professor jumped on board with the wiki approach (which is unlikely), it
> seems we'll run out of name spaces with this strategy of one per course. If
> we don't use course-specific contexts, I can foresee disagreements about
> content on pages for different contexts. It could be interesting perhaps to
> have one context, but with course-specific information separated on that
> page. Professors aren't going to be agreeing on definitions, because of the
> principle of academic freedom.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces

> 2) On a given page, most of the links will have to be prefixed with the
> course's name space. This seems to be a lot of redundant prefixing, and runs
> the risk of an errant global page being created when done hastily. Is there
> a way in MediaWiki pages to define a "default" name space prefix?

I don't think so, but this was something that was promised for the
namespace manager.

> 3) What about the basic concepts of "Talk:", etc. for MW layout? It seems
> like if I use a name space convention as stated above, Talk:Cohesion would
> not be about my course's version of Cohesion, but rather the general
> meaning. This is ambiguous.

Most namespaces have an associated talk namespace, so the talk page
for LOG120:Cohesion would be Talk_LOG120:Cohesion.


Rob Church