[Wikipedia-l] Namespace manager and its potential use

Tue Jan 24 18:44:50 UTC 2006

Hi, I suppose this is a mail that Brian can answer (nooo ... don't kill 
me ... I know you are overloaded with work).

On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language 
without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that 
sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are 
attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from 
Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not 
considered as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear 
those people talk.

Now as much as I understand the namespace manager could help us in that.

We could create namespaces for:

*standardised Neapolitan
*phonetic Neapolitan (at the moment, this would have the majority of 
articles at the moment)
*language A (attributed to the NAP language group)
*language B (attributed to the NAP language group)
etc.

The mainpage would then become a page that leads to the several 
namespaces where the NAMESPACE:Main_page would actually hold the main 
page of that specific namespace and that could be different according to 
contents etc.

So is the namespace manager made for such an approach? If yes, this 
really helps us a lot since we do not need a single wikipedia for each 
of these languages, we do not need to have more than one or two persons 
to contribute to a language and this way these few people can start to 
create contents and others will follow by time. It would not delude 
people who join the projects just to be able to work in their language 
and then see the possibility denied, since very often it is easier to 
decide on a local level if something is to be considered "so different" 
to be a separate language or just a local variety that should go into 
the phonetic part (for example this would be the case for "Maiorese, the 
Neapolitan spoken in Maiori - it is different from Neapolitan of Naples, 
but it is easy to be understood by Neapolitans ... it is just a 
different way to pronounce words, but not having a standardised way of 
writing you can imagine that people from Maiori write a different 
Neapolitan than people from Naples).

Another advantage of having groups of languages on one wiki is that 
organising and administration becomes more effective and less time 
consuming - this does not mean that we should merge big wikis (this 
would be problematic- there are already too many edits to really be able 
to really check everything) - but wikis of a certain "language group 
region" or maybe languages with different writing standards (like nds 
for example) there it would make sense.

Well I need to answer an e-mail of the Neapolitan discussion group and 
therefore it would be helpful to know if this was possible or not.

Thanks!!!

Best, Sabine

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