[Mediawiki-l] namespaces for languages?

[Daniel Barrett]

I recently set up a multilanguage wiki farm using interwiki prefixes in the "interwiki" table: "en" refers to en.mywiki.com, "de" refers to de.mywiki.com, etc.

But I was wondering: could *namespaces* be used instead of interwiki prefixes?  That is, if my wiki has an "en" namespace, a "de" namespace, etc., will MediaWiki's multilanguage code recognize and use them for interlanguage links?  In our particular case, we want articles of all languages to be in the same set of database tables, and this would seem an efficient way to make it happen.

Any reason this wouldn't work? Or is it a bad idea?

Thanks,
DanB