Thread:User talk:Zakgreant/MediaWiki Technical Documentation Plan/Disambiguate/Flat Namespaces


 * we should adopt Wikipedia's approach of using simple titles for pages and then disambiguating as needed. This allows users to browse the documentation in a very natural fashion and quickly move between related concepts with similar names. This has already been done, but not nearly as consistently as is needed.

Not sure I agree with that. The reasons why Wikipedia moved to a flat namespace do not apply here. Theirs was a problem of categorisation: Should the article about the history of Algeria be in 'History/Algeria' or 'Algeria/History'? We don't have that problem - we have some items that make a lot of sense to have in sub-pages: Hooks, Config variables, Class structure (already a heirarchy in itself). The big advantage of sub-pages is the instant navigation that it gives back to the parent.

There are also things such as minutes of meetings, or the markup spec, which suit a heirarchical arrangement. The thing to remember here is that there are a multitude of uses on this wiki, as opposed to the single use that most other WMF wikis have (encyclopedia/dictionary/etc.). Related information needs to be grouped to a certain extent in order to stop us all going mad, and the two mechanisms we have are sub-pages and namespaces (and I don't think we need more namespaces...).

The alternative to sub-pages is to manually create the necessary back-links on each page that is part of a logical group, but this makes for a lot of extra work, given that the software can do this for us, and it invariably ends up looking ugly.

--HappyDog 03:55, 5 October 2010 (UTC)