Talk:Draft namespace

Relationship between draft and main namespaces
I would like to comment on some ideas about how content in the main and draft namespaces can be related. In particular I though on how the following processes be supported:


 * Create a page (in the main namespace) for which a draft exists. Users trying to create an article on a topic, should be aware that a draft already exists for this topic. They should be encouraged to try to improve/publish the draft instead of starting from scratch. If the user creates the page in the regular way (not publishing the draft), the users that have worked n the draft should be informed of such event.
 * Create a draft for an existing page. If a page already exists in the min namespace, does it make sense to allow the creation of a draft for it? Draft creation can be disabled (or at least discouraged) for pages that already exist.
 * Page deletion. Moving to a draft state instead of deleting a new article could reduce the friction in the process of creating a new article. The user should be aware of the fact that the article have been moved to a draft state and indications on how to improve it.

Any other thoughts on this?

Pginer (talk) 15:04, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
 * The Page deletion idea has merit in my opinion. I've not thought about the others in any detail, but others have. Please see Article Creation Workflow/Design that was worked on a few years ago. 64.40.54.203 06:52, 30 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I agree on your first point.
 * On your second point it should also just be a big warning, I could see a redraft of an existing article being a use-case for the draft namespace (something traditionally done in subpages now).
 * Regarding using draft as an alternative to deletion, I think that will be a contentious matter if it became a widespread practice. Incubation has generally not worked in the past.  I could see a limited use of the draft namespace for these purposes (maybe through request for undelete, or through AfD consensus to move to draft), but I, and I'm sure many others, would not like to see it used as a common alternative to deletion.  The problem is that there's no guarantee anyone is still interested in working on the to-be-deleted article.  If we only used it based on request for undelete or AfD consensus, that implies that there are active editors interested in the article and makes it a good candidate. Gigs (talk) 18:35, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Re drafts for already existing articles: it makes sense that they can exist, as there are several use cases where they're beneficial. They can be used as temporary holders for large rewritings and re-organization of an existing article (i.e. any case where Template:Under construction would be useful). They could also include versions of the article that are under discussion under a Request for comment, to keep information with potential to be verifiable under en:WP:PRESERVE, etc. Regular talk pages are commonly used for all these situations, and it would be proper to maintain the proposed changes in the Draft space for these purposes. Diego Moya (talk) 09:28, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Category notes
This is more complicated than I expected after initial investigation. The queries for the category pages are done in CategoryViewer.php. I don't see a straightforward place to hook in to add a filter on namespace. CategoryTree works by subclassing the whole viewer and using a ArticleFromTitle hook to ensure the new viewer is used. We could do that if necessary. We would probably want to subclass CategoryTreeCategoryViewer; at least CategoryTree is enabled throughout the production cluster, so we can just make it a hard dependency. Still, some kind of change to CategoryViewer would probably be necessary. This might be breaking out the logic for building extraConds to a protected method so the subclass can override it. Alternatively, we could add an appropriate hook.

Then there's the other end, where the articles are actually added to the categorylinks table. I think this in LinksUpdate.php. We can use (tested) LinksUpdateConstructed to delete the categories before they ever hit categorylinks. That would mean there could be no toggle (show/hide drafts), though we could exempt certain categories (e.g. draft tracking categories) with some more code at save-time.

There are also some tricky things we could do like changing the sort order, but that's probably a lot of complexity for low return. Superm401 - Talk 01:20, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I think that perhaps letting drafts appear in categories isn't a terrible idea; their name will be prepended by Draft:, so there is some clarity that it isn't a "real article" yet. 110.174.86.241 00:12, 8 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Sorting the category pages by namespace sounds like a useful feature, aside from the benefits with the Drafts. -- Ypnypn (talk) 16:51, 9 December 2013 (UTC)


 * I think the general policy that drafts should not be categorized in article categories should continue. People can add "commented out" categories that can be searched for using the normal search tool. Gigs (talk) 18:37, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Is that because you don't want drafts appearing in the article categories? One of the things we're discussing is suppressing drafts from category listings, so that they can be used normally when writing and publishing an article, without special markup. The limitation is that maintenance categories, like "Wikipedia drafts without references" or the like, would have to be used on the Talk page. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   20:44, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Possibly have it suppress categories that are not ? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:34, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Duplicate topics
I don't see any mention of what happens when a draft page is created with the same name as an article in the main namespace. At the very least, a large warning should be displayed. Possibly it should be prevented altogether. At the moment the standard "Wikipedia does not have a page with this exact title" notice is displayed. Chris55 (talk) 22:54, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Good point. I'd recommending filing a bug in Bugzilla about this, even though a local solution (such as an edit notice) may ultimately be implemented. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:15, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Yep. This is something we need to fix. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   20:19, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguated pages
Hi,

I just want to point out that there could be several drafts created for topics that are not on Wikipedia, but whose articles currently exist (Eg when there are two people named Jimmy Wales, the editor trying to create the second article would possibly try creating it in the same location.) So I'd like some way that "technically" allows creating a draft in the same place as where an article exists, but with, hopefully, some fail safe measure.

Cheers, TheOriginalSoni (talk) 06:33, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * It sounds to me like we may need to think about resurrecting at least part of the 'distributed Wikipedia' concept to accommodate a solution to this problem in MediaWiki by allowing users to create articles by copying them from other wikis. What do you guys think?
 * —&thinsp;RandomDSdevel (talk) 00:57, 30 December 2013 (UTC)