[Wikipedia-l] Re: Simple XML ideas

[Jan Hidders]

From: "Axel Boldt" <axel at uni-paderborn.de>
>
> I think the two are different: the software enforced name spaces are
> there to separate the encyclopedia proper from all the cruft
> surrounding it.

Why do we want to do that? Because some pages are generated? That
is more elegantly solved with macro's like {{{MostWanted}} and
{{{SpecialPages}}}. So why then?

> Your parenthesis notation serves mainly to distinguish
> several concepts with the same name: [[Cardinal (bird)]], [[Cardinal
> (person)]]. I don't think people want to or should be required to
> universally slap on "(person)" to every title that describes a person.

I don't see how that is implied by what I said. All I am saying is that we
could replace names like "special:MostWanted" with something like
"MostWanted (Wikipedia)" and "user_talk:AxelBoldt" with
"Axel Boldt (Talk)" (or, better: "Talk (Axel Boldt)").
Of course you would then reserve certain namespaces such as Wikipedia
so people couldn't add terms in those namespaces, or even make all those
pages uneditable for non-sysops, but otherwise they
would be treated equally.

Why? This would keep the software and the interface simple and more
consistent. Look at the links to namespaces at the bottom of pages.
Sometimes there is none, sometimes one, sometimes two. Why is that?
And why on earth is the link to a discussion page called
a namespace? And why is there no Talk page for SpecialPages?

In my scheme you would have the same rules for every page:
1. at the bottom of page "X" there is a discussion link to "Talk (X)" except
    when "X" is already of the form "Talk (Y)".
2. at the bottom of page "X (Y)" there is a link to namespace "Y"

Or is that too simple? :-)

-- Jan Hidders