On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 3:01 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Flow has a new namespace: Topic. It has an even
namespace number by
default: 2600.
Talk pages till now have had odd numbers, and some scripts relied on that.
And that is still the case. For example,
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Search is a Flow-enabled talk page, and
its wgNamespaceNumber is 1.
So it's still a reasonable assumption that the talk page for a page is in
the odd namespace N+1.
Now the topics that appear on every Flow board page are in this special
Topic: namespace and that is not odd but 2600. But this is not the talk
namespace for the regular pages in namespace 2599, it's a specialized
namespace like Graph or Worfklow. A Flow topic like
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Savgw0ltqlin3m69 is not the talk page
of anything.
I don't think there's a technical difficulty in making NS_TOPIC odd, but
it's implying things that aren't so and I'm not sure what the win is.
Also, a program that wants to handle
Flow posts will probably need APIs and queries that are different from
those that are needed for handling old-style wiki pages in any case.
Yes, some documentation at [2] and [3]. There's been discussion whether
to make existing naive operations like "Add a new section to this talk
page" or "Add a comment or category to this talk page" Do The Right Thing
on a talk page that's actually a Flow board. See [1] and its phab tasks;
the consensus is tools need to understand they're dealing with a Flow board
to make the right choices. Anyway, neither of those actions make sense on
an individual Flow topic.
But still, I'll ask to be on the safe side: Does anybody know how prevalent
that is? Is anybody else familiar with scripts, gadgets or extensions that
rely on this?
I don't know. It depends how tools discover a page in the Topic namespace
and decide to operate on it.
(No, this is not an April fools joke. Really, it
isn't. Yes, I admit that
it sounds a lot like xkcd 1172. And like WP:BEANS. But no, it's not an
April fools joke.)
We have some time to figure this out, all talk pages are being converted to
Flow boards on May 8th. (Am I too late? :-) )
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Architecture/API#Should_existing_API_ca…
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Architecture/API#Use_cases
[3]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Flow/API
--
=S Page WMF Tech writer