[Mediawiki-l] A problem of language page control

[Platonides]

Anne Wilson wrote:
> As our wiki grows I become more aware that any major re-organisation needs 
> doing now, before it becomes impossible.  With that in mind I've taken the 
> first steps in categorizing the pages.  I've been looking at extensions that 
> provide navigation aids, and see that category pages are essential to most of 
> those.  That brings up this very thorny question of language pages.
> 
> Unless something is done about it, the Welcome page could have 20 or more 
> entries on its category page, depending on how active our translators have 
> been.  This clearly gets to the point where the page is unreadable.
> 
> It has been said to me that we should be using namespaces for languages, and 
> that doing that would mean that in a search, for example, only pages in your 
> system language would be returned.  I've only just started reading the 
> documentation, but I get the impression that this is not so.

It is not how they are commonly used. But nothing prevents you to do so.
Namespaces partition the content. It is usually done on its type (eg.
encyclopedic articles vs information about wikipedia like electing an
admin) but it could be by language just as well.

A common choice is to use subpages with language codes to separate the
language, or use a different wiki for each language and link them with
interwikis.
There _should_ be some more in depth explanation at www.mediawiki.org
but I don't see it to give you the link.