Wiki focus - user versus developer documentation

Minh Ha Duong haduong at centre-cired.fr
Fri Aug 29 09:49:30 CEST 2008


I very much agree with Michael: Ben's idea has legs, it's going to go far.

What do you know about the namespaces in wikimedia ?
I just read
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Namespace
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Namespace
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Custom_namespaces
and wonder if it would be a good idea to use them to
separate User-oriented from Devs-oriented pages.

In summary, namespaces:
- allows separation of different kinds of unrelated content; several 
namespaces have special features related to their intended purpose
- allows unrelated content to be stored in one wiki, but requires lots of  
extra typing
- provides facilities to limit searches to a particular area
- in principle allows easy exporting (but not with the Export feature, which 
is for selected individual pages) of a selection of work (categories could 
also be used for this more cleanly)
- allows for feature separation

*  They can be detected by the CSS and so we can have subtle visual 
differences (on Blender's site they are perhaps too subtle).
* Implementing namespaces requires administrator intervention. The 
Blender-style "prefix/" solution is probably fully userland.

Any comments ?

Two direct questions to Openmoko:
*  There is a custom namespace already, Openmoko: Which kind of pages are 
supposed go in it ?
* Same question with the  Help:  namespace ?

Minh



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