[WikiEN-l] Question about MediaWiki namespace

Tue Jan 6 01:39:55 UTC 2004

Hi.

I understand that we now have the MediaWiki namespace and that we can 
insert the contents of MediaWiki:XYZ into an article by inserting either 
{{subst:XYZ}} or {{msg:XYZ}} (and yes, I know their difference).

Are there any plans to start using this functionality wide-spreadedly?

For example, all the articles on Greek letters have a list of links to 
all the other Greek letters at the bottom. I had recently moved some of 
the pages (e.g. [[Omega (letter)]] to [[Omega]]), and so I had to modify 
all of the articles correspondingly. Then I had to change them all 
*again* because I forgot one of them.

All of this would have been easier if this short list of links were a 
page in the MediaWiki namespace and were included in the Greek letter 
articles using {{msg:}}.

So, my question basically is: Should I do this?

One shortcoming I see with this is that each of the Greek-letter 
articles would then have a link to itself. I guess one could resolve 
that with coding; perhaps {{msg:}} should automatically change [[XYZ]] 
and [[XYZ|.*]] to '''XYZ''' if it's used in [[XYZ]]. Or something.

Boxes like those on the right of articles like 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Franks could also benefit 
from this.

Timwi