[Wikipedia-l] Re: Preferences

[Tim Starling]

"Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote in
message news:3F530F1F.3000806 at pobox.com...
> (CC'd to wikitech-l)
>
> Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> > Can we have a [[Wikipedia:Preferences]] page that will be the header of
the
> > [[Special:Preferences]] page ? (like [[Wikipedia:RecentChanges]] and
> > [[Special:RecentChanges]]).
> > In fact it may be very cool if all [[Special:xxx]] started with an
include
> > of [[Wikipedia:xxx]].
> > It may be very useful especially for localize (no-english Wikipedia)
> > specification to add explication and links.
> > How?
>
> Tim Starling's been working on some experimental code whereby various
> additional things can be made like this.
>
> Another possibility is to make [[Special:xxx]] just appear a little more
> like a normal page; that is, there would be an "edit this page" link by
> which you can edit the header text.
>
> So instead of a separate [[Wikipedia:Recentchanges]] to find and
> maintain, you'd just go to [[Special:Recentchanges]] and hit edit in the
> usual fashion. A [[Special talk:xxx]] namespace to go with it would be
> useful too.
>
> (Technical note: currently Special: is given numeric code -1; if we were
> storing such pages in the database this would interfere with some code
> that deals with non-talk vs talk pages as being even/odd-numbered.
> Reassigning it to the next available positive integer (8?) shouldn't
> interfere with anything.)

Your way is a bit easier to use, but my way is a bit more general. The thing
about special pages is that they often have several messages -- for example
Special:Userlogin has the form where you type in your details, a message for
new users, a message for existing users, etc. Also, my scheme could be used
for things like page deletion, where there is no special page. Perhaps
there's a way we can combine the best of both schemes. I'll think about it.

Maybe I'll do some more work on this once I've finished with the other few
things I'm doing at the moment.

-- Tim Starling.