User:Makanyane/namespace proposal

Discussion on this issue has come up partly because of a few logic problems in the incorporation of some TWC articles (eg: essays in The Scriptorium) and also due to desire to sort out permission status for use by others of articles in the main TWC wiki areas.

What I'm now wondering is if we can shunt some of the 'difficult' areas into separate namespaces, which are a sort of half-way house, using wiki software but forum type permissions, whether that would free up the main article area to have some sort of free-use or fair-use license (at the moment not having license means technically nothing can be re-used). It could also allow some official TWC doc's to be housed on Wiki, which gives them the advantage of the history function, and the Wiki the advantage of greater incoming traffic (from TWC stickies etc)

Spiel over - please discuss on TWC_Wiki_talk:Namespaces & thanks to Sim for explaining technicalities and possibilities. A few ideas are stolen shamelessly from discussion with him...

differences to existing and comments are in italics:

Draft Ideas

Current / adapted

Main

"Real" content; articles - Has no prefix

Not really sure how far this should split down - with exception of new areas detailed at bottom it could just cause more confusion? It contains distinct groupings of information eg:

• TW Community - TWC, other forums, probably inc CA info, forum member biogs. TWC section would include non-formal information like histories, summaries of areas and explanatory articles etc. Things like Helios would stay in this category. Possibly extracting member section, see below
• TW Games - Vanilla game info strategy guides etc.
• TW Mods - Mods for any TW Game
• Modding - Modding for TW Games and also general eg. how to use photoshop etc.

I think those can be handled by category system rather that new namespaces - but am open to ideas

If modding or mods specific to any other game get introduced with forum expansion etc then I think they'd need own namespace so you'd have EU3:Campaign Map Editing etc

Would personally like to see some form of free or fair use license applied to this section

User

User pages; profiles - Prefix User:

- generally re-directing to article pages due to high degree of overlap between users and 'subjects'

- can be used with sub pages eg. User:username\sandbox for experiments and developing articles etc.

I'd be inclined to stay with the re-direct to articles because of overlap between users and forum members who'll have articles - but also see should members be divided out..

Project

Information about the wiki - Prefix is TWC_Wiki:

- currently contains some policy info and help page

stays as is - some wiki's have separate Help: section in use - I doubt we'd have enough content in that to justify separate section

Image

Media description pages - Prefix is Image:

- uploaded files automatically go to this namespace

no change

Template

Template pages - Prefix is Template:

- for making universal templates that can be applied via use of {{template}} to other pages

no change

Category

Category description pages - Prefix is Category:

no change

Proposed

Scriptorium:

Articles and essays transferred in from TWC Scriptorium

A lot of scriptorium essays etc. don't really fit in well with Wiki concept - if you have "Fred's essay on the holocaust" you get into problems if subsequent editing changes the sense of the article. Eg its no-longer Fred's opinion but is still using half his text.

In order to have the scriptorium on here it really needs separate editing guidelines, and if free / fair use is given to other areas, to be excluded from that, unless every article author is individually contacted for permission before import. Separate editing guidelines I think could allow for alterations as far as formatting, fixing typos, and adding internal links to other articles. Most other types of 'improvement' wouldn't be workable unless author specifically gave article to main space for wikifying. Editing could be restricted to sysop - or patrolled (?)

NB: I don't think any of Category 3 (Tutorials) or Category 5 (hosted mods) except for index pages should go in separate Scriptorium section, as otherwise there will be a lot of unhelpful duplication between things there and in main section.

Design: Some form of intermediate styling between normal and TWC: official area

Mod Registry:

For the actual registry forms

Possibly only really worthwhile if the Registrar would want to migrate main storage of registry forms to Wiki. Would need some type of protection / patrol so that terms of use of mods weren't changed by unauthorised users (could just revert edits other than formatting made my anyone other than registrar ?).

Registry on Wiki would have some advantages over forum version in terms of searches, links etc.

Design: Some form of intermediate styling between normal and TWC: official area

TWC:

TWC Official Documents

Limited number of official documents, the things that would be stickied around the forums or linked from main navigation bar: Constitution , Rules, FAQ, ToS etc. Again only really useful if its likely that these can become the 'real' version of documents, eg. the one's that get updated by staff / officers.

Area to be designed to look more like TWC and to be protected by default to sysop editing

I don't think this protected area should include things like the Category:Artifex pages, although that should be as accurate as possible, its's hardly critical and people adding themselves into things when they get promoted etc, is one of most frequent type of edits by non-regular users (eg its something to encourage people to start using Wiki)

Other Games:

if the forum expansion goes ahead and modding information about non-TW games is available, then set up new namespaces eg: CIV: to cover each of them, same rules and probably styling as main space, prefix used to avoid confusion in trying to use same page names

Member:

Sim mentioned this one to me, hadn't entirely seen point initially but could end up with naming problems, forum members have nasty habit of using faction and general names "Seleucid Empire" and "WilliamTheConqueror", "Spartan" etc so umm, meh, much as I dislike the idea of moving all the Category:People articles it might be better to do so now than be disambiguating everything for ever after.....