Topic on Project:Village Pump

Several years ago (2007) I was very active on both MediaWiki and Wikipedia and of course had two accounts - one on each wiki. I am now getting active again, and just discovered that in 2015 my MediaWiki account User: Egfrank was deleted and moved to User: Egfrank~mediawikiwiki.I thought at first this meant that I would have one user account that would work on both Wikipedia and MediaWiki and that I could have a single talk page to handle messages from both wikis. However, if messages concerning MediaWiki are posted on my Wikipedia talk page - full URLs need to be used to reference mediawiki articles - which is not terribly convenient for me or anyone having to contact me. If I direct traffic to User talk:Egfrank (on MediaWiki) then I and people trying to contact me can use MediaWiki namespaces for links, BUT now I have (a) a talk page without a user (b) two talk pages to track rather than one.

So what is the best way to handle this?

1. Is there some way to use namespaces to link to MediaWiki user accounts and pages from within Wikipedia? It is not convenient to have to cut and paste long URLs in messages. Additionally there is room for error and miscommunication if someone is talking to me on Wikipedia about MediaWiki business - if there are links to articles in both MediaWiki and Wikipedia, the person will see a blue link and think they are leaving a MediaWiki link when in fact they are leaving a Wikipedia link.

2. Should I revert the delete of my mediawiki user page? If there is no way to handle the linking problem, then I really do need two talk pages, one on mediawiki and one on wikipedia. A talk page without a user page seems rather odd and confusing.

Best, User: Egfrank / User: Egfrank~mediawikiwiki (on MediaWiki)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Egfrank (on Wikipedia)

About namespaces maybe you mean interwiki links. You can use [[w:User:Egfrank]] to link to your wikipedia user, and [[mw:User:Egfrank~mediawikiwiki]] to link to your mediawiki user page

About your account, apparently you have 2 separate accounts here, one of them (the one with ~mediawikiwiki) is the old one, while the other is the one handled with CentralAuth. You probably could login with the ~mediawikiwiki one too.

I don't know if someone can merge both accounts here, but if not, you can move the page User:Egfrank~mediawikiwiki to User:Egfrank, put a redirect in place, or writing a notice about your current page location.

Indeed I did mean interwiki links - thanks for the "how to do this". I moved the egfrank~mediawikiwik pages back to User:egfrank without a problem - merge was not necessary since there hasn't been activity for years (aside from one very recent message). But I have a new problem: the restored user talk page is in the old format rather than in "Flow" mode. Is it possible to convert the page to Flow? I checked on Flow/Request_Flow_on_a_page but the section on individuals seems to be about individuals requesting flow on wikis before their wikis have adopted flow, rather than fixing a user talk page that got left behind when user pages were converted to flow.

Apparently you can enable it on your talk page activating it in your preferences, under beta features: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures

Many thanks again!