Re: Colons in wiki page titles, and commit fest page names

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> I don't know how the page naming like Todo:Detail and CommitFest:March
> page naming got started, but it is not how other mediawiki sites use it

Those pages are all items in a larger category, and that's how the
subpages in a category are displayed. This is standard usage if you're on
a site with heavy categorization. Look at
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Category:Help for an example of it being
used properly by an intrinsic page.

> I think Todo/Detail and CommitFest/March would be more usual. Then you
> could also create a CommitFest index page and have natural path names.

Ultimately what could happen here is that pages like the CommitFest ones
only need to get tagged with the appropriate category set, and then a
category summary page can automatically include all of them rather than
someone having to keep a current summary page up to date.

Unfortunately, the current state of the wiki used some elements of that
practice but didn't do everything correctly. Some of the naming artifacts
are used but we're not getting the advantages of page generation yet.

The proper fix here is to correct/improve the category and/or namespace
structure, which may naturally end up having categorized pages with a : in
the concatenated title. I think stepping away from that standard just to
make titles prettier right now would be a waste of your time, and it may
end up being a counterproductive move in the long run anyway.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD