New Proposal: Namespaces

Ken has raised the ugly subject of namespaces :) and his arguments are valid...

He wants to have all World of warcraft content in its own namespace, which will be globally searchable (and all the other games in their own too)

I am in favour of this change (before WoLK and AoC come out) as it would be better to do it now rather than once the community is split between different games

There are some things to discuss though, what to do with the psuedo namespaces we have addon: macro: etc as these would be wow specific.

I will post a poll in this thread once the discussion has been underway for a while

Let me give the arguments why I think we should have this:
- When this website grows, we will need to do add categories eventually anyway. If we do it later, it's going to be a lot more work than doing it now.
- It will be more clear what content belongs to what part of the wiki.
- Lots of pages have a neutral title, but actually talk about WoW-specific topics. This is confusing.
- When people post content without the right category, we'll just talk to them that they should do it correctly in the future. Changing these few pages isn't going to be much, because not that many pages get created. Adding the category issue to the 'wiki guidelines' wiki page will inform people about how it works.

I wouldn't mind to move pages and delete the old referrers if I get the rights to do so.

I'm a total Wiki nub but it makes sense to me. Pain now > Paaaaaain later.

The forums will suffer from the same issue. The macro forum for instance, is also WoW specific at the moment. It might be wise to regroup the forums and create general, macro, help,etc forums per game.

at the risk of derailing this thread: the forums are not supposed to be a repository of knowledge and so I don't think it matters that CoH macros are discussed alongside WoW ones in the same way it is irrelevant that Keyclone and Octopus are discussed in the software forum.

the Macros forum is for people to request and offer assistance with macros and addons regardless of the game once they have a product they like and want to share they should then populate the relevant namespace in the wiki. Unfortunately the last part doesn't seem to be that effective ;)

[offtopic]
Splitting off forums is easy to do later on, because you don't have to move specific topics.
An easy way to resolve it - as many forums do - is making people post topic titles with tags, like:
"[wow] macro problem"
This way you don't even have to create separate forums.
[/offtopic]

If we do namespaces on the wiki, I propose tags for this forum categorie, just as in the Software forums.
I was thinking of:

[global] - global wiki topics, such as this
[wow] - wow- related wiki topics
[other] - anything else