[Wikipedia-l] Re: Simple XML ideas

[Mark Christensen]

> Well, it seems that the battle is over, and I lost. :-) 
> I'm still not really  convinced because I feel that you
> are seeing threats that are not really  there. Was 
> consistency ever a real problem when we still had 
> subpages? Yes, some articles contained pieces of 
> discussion that belonged on the Talk pages, but that 
> was usually solved in time. 

I want to be clear about one thing.  My argument has less to
do with how user and talk pages are differentiated by the 
software than it does with the point of having these extra
namespaces -- we want them to seem different to users, so 
they know they are in a different part of the site.  

This could be done while using the Talk:XYZ format, and 
it could also be done using XYZ the (Talk) format, but I
think it is important to make the conceptual distinction 
between disambiguation of terms, and the creation of a 
penumbra of wikipedia related materials which are not
encyclopedia articles.  If we were doing this from the 
beginning, I think we'd be far more willing to do it your
way, but fortunately or unfortunately we are already 
working with live code that uses Talk:XYZ style 
namespaces. 

Another issue I just thought about is that we've 
discussed at great length when originally thinking 
through the idea of namespaces it that we might like to 
at some point create a "Stable:XYZ" namespace, which 
will contain locked versions of wikipedia articles 
which have been in some special way validated by a group 
of experts in that field.  These articles might very 
well include () style disambiguation, at some point 
we'd clearly want a stable version of 
"Lincoln (Nebraska)." This and this would 
would make using () style namespaces for the stable 
branch of the wikipedia "codebase" very confusing.

Yours
Mark