Short description

Namespaces are the idea that different bits of the wiki are fundamentally different, and should be treated as such. This is not categories,but a meta concept that includes them.

Namespaces are such things like:

Image: or Media: (for all images and media) Category: (All categories) Special: (features of the wiki engine, such as Special:all pages)

What they do is allow clear seperation of things, for human and computer comprehension

Discussion

You can use subpages for that currently. They scale better than this weird concept obviously copied from MediaWiki. For reference, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Namespace for more rational on the MediaWiki concept (which doesn't support subpages btw).

Say again? How does subpages do what namespaces do?

Whether the namespaces are indicated by a prefix (/Special:) or a root-level directory (/Special/) doesn't matter the way I see it. The problem is that, without namespaces, it is difficult to manage the different varieties of content. This change would mostly apply to the master pages and pages like the user homepages with URLs that are automatically generated in various places, or it would be easy for users to make this change themselves. This is something the Fedora Project would like to see. We may be able to send help your way if you need it to make this happen. - PatrickBarnes

You can classify them like this:

Which features are you missing?

User pages can already be created automatically in another wiki (since 1.5). Another example where it would help?

Behavior that subpages are missing

I tend to agree that the subpages concept can be used instead of namespaces. Still, there's a few behaviors that I'd like to see which would make them more useful (-- DeronMeranda 2006-01-13 19:57:55):

  1. Most of the pages which come with MoinMoin should be in a subpage to avoid unwanted pollution (the underlay concept helped this a lot, but is not enough). For example, instead of HelpOnInstalling, perhaps it should be MoinMoin/HelpOnInstalling or Help/Installing. If my wiki is for instance primarily about some other software product Foo, I'd want the main HelpOnInstalling to be about Foo not MoinMoin.

  2. Some pages are "virtual" (or act as-if they are virtual) like UserPreferences, RecentChanges, SystemInfo, and such. It would be nice if these were a subpage of something. Perhaps the VirtualPages concept and patch should be revisited too.

  3. User homepages should by default be subpages of something, like Users/. Or if they are put into different wikis, where is this documented? -- Update, see also FeatureRequests/UserNamespace

  4. One of the behaviors that MediaWiki has is that namespace-qualified pages are not normally considered when doing a search.

  5. I really like the Talk: namespace in MediaWiki. True, a namespace convention of /Talk or similar would almost completely work as a replacement, but:

    • Talk pages should be excluded from searches by default
    • There should be a "talk" or "discuss" button or similar at the top of each page to make it very easy for users to get to a discussion page.

    • Update, see also FeatureRequests/DiscussionAndOrCommentPages

  6. Naming conventions are used for some "special" pages like Category*, *Template, *Group, and *Dict. This convention can make it harder to do things like exclude those on searches, etc.; or to help prevent a novice user from unknowingly creating these pages by a poor selection of their WikiNames.

CategoryFeatureRequest

MoinMoin: FeatureRequests/NameSpaces (last edited 2010-09-24 13:15:25 by 207)