Project:Village Pump/Archive 2

__NEWSECTIONLINK__ This page is for discussing broad issues of policy, structure and content of MediaWiki.org.


 * Discussion about smaller site-related topics (e.g. problems, specific pages, etc.) should go in Project:Forum.
 * MediaWiki.org is growing (in particular there is a movement to transfer in a lot of content from meta) and there are several areas of policy that need to be formulated in order to avoid confusion and complications in the future. This page should be used to state issues that need to be addressed. The items on this page are in no particular order and some are more important than others, but all will need discussion at some stage. Please add to this list. --HappyDog 03:24, 2 July 2006 (UTC) 

Decided Issues
Some issues have either (a) been decided or (b) not been objected to in previous archived discussion, so therefore I am proposing the following actions. If there are no objections to these by the 31st October 2006 then I will go ahead and implement them or add them as policy, as appropriate (though bear with me if they don't all happen on 1st Nov!). Any decisions reached on this page that are not listed below have already been implemented/acted upon (or required no change) --HappyDog 19:32, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

A request has been logged at 7778

Namespaces
(see Project:Current issues/Archive)
 * 'Project:' namespace will be renamed 'Site:'
 * Initial request refused by Brion - discussion ongoing.
 * A new 'Extension:' namespace will be created. DONE --HappyDog 09:40, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Languages
(see Project:Current issues/Archive) This has all been written up at Project:Language policy. --HappyDog 01:19, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Policy: All pages with no suffix should be in English.
 * Policy: All other languages go in an appropriately named sub-page of the main article. E.g. the French version of Help:Contents goes in Help:Contents/fr.
 * This is compatible with the import/export of Help data (see Automating help page export)
 * The above has only properly been decided for the Help: namespace. Discussion about other namespaces is ongoing, below.

Other
These have not been discussed, but are hopefully non-contentious. They need developer input, so I want to request them at the same time as the namespace changes, above, which is why I am rasing them here. --HappyDog 19:32, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Enable the import functionality for administrators (this will be required when to import data from meta).
 * According to Werdna at #wikimedia-tech both have been enabled. Lcarsdata (Talk) 12:27, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
 * According to Special:Import: "No transwiki import sources have been defined and direct history uploads are disabled.", so perhaps the feature is enabled, but no sources are defined? --HappyDog 13:28, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * DONE --HappyDog 03:44, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Change the default search options ($wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault) to search in Main, Help: Manual: and Extension. (see Project:Forum. DONE --HappyDog 09:40, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

=2008=

PD Help
Moved from User talk:Skizzerz.

Hi Skizzerz. Thanks for your work in sorting out the non-PD Help categorisation. I hope I'm not shitting in your milk with these comments... the foibles of Category:Help have only just been brought to my attention by your edits.

In my opinion (and I think it is an accident of history that this is not already the case) Category:Help should be a category for all help content, organised sensibly into sub-cats, of which PD Help should be one. It would be easy to add all PD help pages to a single category by editing Template:PD Help Page but I am aware that it would involve undoing a lot of your recent edits to put the other pages back into the category (or an appropriate sub-category). What do you reckon? --HappyDog 03:28, 2 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I did see your objection before I started in Category talk:Help, but since that was from September '06 and it seems to have stayed that way since then, I assumed that it was the way we were going with this. Anyway, going along with what you said that Category:Help should be a category for all help content, isn't that what this entire wiki is anyway? The majority of the Manual: namespace contains help content, a lot of Project: namespace pages have help content, and quite a few others do as well. This encompasses over half of the wiki, so if you feel that you want to categorise that many pages... then feel free. Otherwise, I think that since the wiki was designed to have documentation and help, that the category isn't really all that necessary.
 * However, if you still think that the category is needed, I must say that "PD Help" is not an appropriate name for the ones containing the PD help pages. You may find this strange, but consider this: Help:Copying currently details how to copy the PD help pages to one's local wiki. However, once they are copied there, the people at that wiki have the option of re-licensing that material under whatever they want, so having a PD Help category contain cc-by-sa licensed pages (as an example) would be quite odd. At any rate, do whatever you want with the cats, I just wanted to say my 2 cents. Just make sure that if you are reverting me, that you use "undo" instead of "rollback" as I've made some back-to-back contributions to some of those pages. -- Skiz zerz  16:22, 2 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... those are some valid points.
 * In terms of the categorisation of the PD help pages, really this should be included in the PD Help Page template, so that all PD help pages are automatically categorised. This also means that if you import the pages to a new wiki, you can simply modify this template to categorise them however you want (or not at all, if you choose).  It therefore doesn't matter from this point of view how we choose to categorise things here.
 * The original aim of Category:Help was as a second-level category for help content. It would not include any pages (except perhaps Help:Contents and Manual:Contents), just sub-categories that point to various other help categories: e.g. Category:Help for users, Category:Help for sysadmins, Category:Manual, Category:Public-domain help, etc.  Basically, the point was to allow the category tree to be usable as site navigation ("OK - I'm here for help, what help resources are there... OK there's the FAQ, there's help for sysadmins... oh no, wait - installation, that's what I'm after") rather than using it as a bunch of boxes to put things in.
 * Whether that's a sensible aim is still open for discussion, but I don't think it's quite so redundant as it appears on first glance --HappyDog 05:16, 4 August 2008 (UTC) ...and you made me think in order to give this reply - my first reaction was "that's all very true... I hadn't thought of that..." :-)
 * Having a second level category with nothing but more specific sub-categories is indeed quite sensible. It provides an extra means of navigation to specific pages that perhaps may not be easily found via search. I also agree with you that the category should be included in PD Help Page and not put onto every page, as it helps keep things synced. Perhaps this discussion could be opened up in a more publicly-known place for some other people to give their input before we go off and do drastic changes to the category structure of the site. -- Skiz zerz  16:09, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Agreed - moved to Project:Current issues. --HappyDog 21:54, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Support desk overhaul
This is just a short notice about a discussion I started regarding the future of our support desk: Please have a look at Project talk:Support desk and comment there. -- :bdk: 23:51, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Babel
Would it be helpful to import the Babel templates? It's good that we've avoided the scourge of userboxes, but MW.org is multilingual enough that Babel templates might ease communication difficulties. —Emufarmers(T 13:09, 18 October 2008 (UTC)


 * This was briefly brought up here, and in my opinion that answer still stands. I would like to see a strong consensus from a number of regular admins before any attempt were made to bring those templates here.  --HappyDog 00:48, 23 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I saw that, but the question there was only whether there already were Babel templates, not whether there should be. —Emufarmers(T 02:17, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Subpages in the template namespace
While doing some work today I noticed that subpages are not currently enabled in the template namespace. They would be useful to group template-specific dependencies (i.e. templates that another template depends on, but is not depended on by any other template). Is there any reason not to do this? MinuteElectron 21:13, 19 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Odd that it has been explicitly disabled. It should always be on for templates, so many templates use subpage tricks! Splarka 12:20, 22 November 2008 (UTC)