Thread:User talk:Zakgreant/MediaWiki Technical Documentation Plan/Disambiguate/Flat Namespaces/reply (2)

I can see now that I wasn't using the right language to describe what I mean. Let me go fix that. ... Ok, I've stripped out the "Flat Namespaces" bit.

Now, on the actual issue as I understand it (and I'm happy to learn more and change my understanding. :)

The current situation is that one topic may be covered in different ways for different audiences. Take Parser functions as an example:
 * A user may simply want to know how to use conditionals in a template (and good luck to the poor devil – figuring out that conditionals live in an extension called ParserFunctions isn't exactly intuitive.) They need Help:Extension:ParserFunctions
 * An administrator will want to read Extension:ParserFunctions, so that they can understand how to install the extension.
 * A developer who wants to write their own parser functions will want Manual:Parser_functions

It's clear that each of these namespaces is needed. It's also clear that Parser functions in the main namespace is pretty essential to help folks find what they need.

As a side note, there should also be pages like: Conditionals, If and Switch. As Rasmus from PHP says, "Information should be where people look for it." No user is going to go looking in Parser functions.

I think that someone should be able to visit http://mediawiki.org/wiki/topic (where topic is some reasonable thing like If or Bold) and get a reasonable response. (Also, it'd be even nicer if http://mediawiki.org/topic worked.

We need to be more consistent as well – users are likely to be a bit confused at how ParserFunctions takes them to Extension:ParserFunctions, while Parser functions takes them to a disambiguation page.