[Wikipedia-l] Re: yet another modest proposal to address

[Jan Hidders]

From: "Uri Yanover" <uriyan_subscribe at yahoo.com>
>

> What I meant is that the _author_ is the one who controls
> the way links are transformed, not wiki software.

So did I. :-)

> That
> way noone is going to come up saying "Wikipedia made
> a link for me that I didn't intend to". With aliases,
> the author could either use the aliased link or
> make an escape of his own, and it's all under his control.

In some sense, but if you provide a list of #base pragma's  you have to know
which subject resides in which namespace if you want to determine in advance
how it is going to be expanded. In Tim's proposal this is not necessary.

> True, this requires a bit of thinking on behalf of the
> author, but it also makes up for the defficiency in
> ordering that was created by the elimination of
> subpages.

That deficiency is a feature, not a bug. What we want to avoid is that
writers qualify all terms of a certain knowledge space (fictional universe,
scientific field, ...)  as belonging to the corrsponding name space. Not all
terms in mathematics should be in the name space Mathematics, but only those
that have to be because the term has also a different meaning in other
fields. The same holds for article subjects from Middle Earth.

Kind regards,

-- Jan Hidders