From: kband@www.llamacom.com
Thus instead of the ":" being a reserved character anywhere in a title, only "user:", "talk:", "wikipedia:" etc. need to be reserved. Any other uses of colons should be fine. This will let us have entries for books with standard formatting of the subtitle (e.g., "The Muggles: A Tale of Woe") or other natural uses of the colon.
There is a simpeler solution. The actual contents of Wikipedia get the namespace "content:". If everything is prefixed with a namespace then the first colon is always the end of the namespace.
-- Jan Hidders