On Sat, 6 Nov 2004 11:10:35 +0100, Giovanni <gputignano(a)tiscali.it> wrote:
I don't understand well the use of Namespaces. Why
use them? And why use Extra Namespace?
In general, namespaces are just a way of keeping different aspects of
a site seperate within the database. This allows them to be searched
independently, dumped to backups independently (e.g. for use by
mirrors and forks), styled differently (so there is a visible
distinction) and even have certain software features enabled and
disabled (e.g. discussion namespaces have the "add a comment" tab
enabled, you can switch "sub-page" behaviour on and off per
namespace).
Originally, I think there were 4 namespaces used by Wikipedia when the
concept was invented: one for encyclopedia articles, one for
discussing each article [Talk:], one for "meta"-information about the
project (policy documents and so forth) [Wikipedia:], and one for
discussing those policy pages [Wikipedia_talk:]. Since then, others
have been added, such as one for customising the interface
[MediaWiki:], and one for storing reusable templates [Template:];
generally, each namespace has an attached _talk: namespace.
People have found various uses for extra namespaces: projects
producing different kinds of content might want them to be seperated
in the database this way, or tweaks to the software might be made to
make different parts of the site behave differently based on being in
a different namespace. (One of the most common extra features is more
flexible user rights management, which should be coming soon;
per-namespace permissions could probably be combined with this
reasonably easily). On
meta.wikimedia.org, extra namespaces have been
created to draft the user's guide which will eventually go into the
Help: namespaces of the software in various languages - in order to
cope with all the translations on one multi-lingual wiki, there needs
to be "Help:", "Aide:", "Hilfe:", etc, all nicely
seperated.
So, you may well have no need for namespaces, and may well not have a
use for any more than the software provides by default. But seperating
content from discussion, and project/community content (policies,
FAQs, welcomes, etc) from end-user content (whatever it is your
community is producing - such as encyclopedia articles, pages of
quotations, reviews, or whatever) is probably quite a good idea for
most sites. There are some where it doesn't really make sense, if the
discussion *is* the content, but MediaWiki is mainly useful for those
where it does.
HTH
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]