Namespace proliferation
This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some mediawiki.org users, but may not have wide support. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes. |
Does it matter that there is such a proliferation of namespaces? It seems like new ones keep getting added: Thread (for LQT), Module (for Scribunto), Book (for Collection), etc. Perhaps the adding of more namespaces should be avoided when there are only going to be a few pages in those namespaces.
Disadvantages
edit- If you're exporting all the content from a wiki, that's more visits to Special:AllPages to get the complete list of pages, because you have to go namespace by namespace.
- There are only 26 letters in the alphabet, so not all of these namespaces can have one-letter aliases (e.g. Talk:, Template:, Thread:, etc. all start with T).
- It's more stuff to sort through when you get a drop-down list of namespaces.
- Some implementations of features using separate namespaces clog up RecentChanges by creating a separate page for each entry (e.g. a new post to a thread).