Nicolas Vervelle <nvervelle <at> gmail.com> writes:
My own preference would be to have this in the core
for several reasons.
[...]
Yes, the core code already handles disambiguation pages specially in some
ways (Special:Disambiguations, MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage). But it
treats them as exceptional cases - a bit of a hack.
Proposal:
A fundamentally more robust and flexible way to handle disambiguation
pages would be to move them all into their own namespace.
For example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_(disambiguation) could both redirect to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disambiguation:Bow
This would make it much more consistent with the ordinary wikipage
functions and internationalization, as well as making it easy to
programmatically identify disambiguation pages without affecting the
database schema.
Though there would initially be some upheaval as pages were moved in bulk,
the result would be stabler.
One drawback is that dab pages from all namespaces would end up in the new
"Disambiguation" namespace. So,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Football
would redirect to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disambiguation:Portal:Football
That is not a major problem, as it is easy to identify pages beginning with
"Disabiguation:Portal:" etc, though it makes it harder to list mainspace
dabpages (they would have to be identified by eliminating valid namespace
prefixes from the pagename). A similar cross-namespace shadow hierarchy
already exists at Template:Editnotices/Page/ for edit notices.
After the initial bulk creation, a bot would need to check for new dab pages
that needed moving into the dab namespace, and for new pages in the dab
namespace that lacked a redirect in the relevant non-dab namespace.
Alternatively, the need for separate redirect pages could be obviated if
MediaWiki automatically redirected browsers when a corresponding
dab-namespace exists (but this would be a departure from the existing
practice of having all redirects as editable wikipages).
Individual wikis would be free to opt out of the new approach.