Namespace
From eg
In wikis a namespace is created or differentiated with a colon. The text before the colon indicates a fixed POV or purpose for that namespace. For instance, the page "zooid:system" is a view of the zooid system from the POV of zooid:itself. See all namespaces for a list of all currently in this wiki. Some notes on the evolution of these is below.
If there is no other view of the zooid system then there may be a redirect in place to present the only view that exists. These inter-namespace redirects should be rare, used only to establish a reflexive discipline: disallowing or discouraging specific POVs that could lead to endless regress, e.g. "Ed's view of Joe's view of zooid's view of Ed's view of the average zooid user's view of the zooid system". If you see this developing it is a good time to limit the number of POVs that will be allowed in this wiki and put some inter-namespace redirects in place. Most needed are already in place:
[edit] Evolution of namespaces
Users evolve wikis to serve current needs. In this wiki there was originally:
- a main namespace, for relatively objective and neutral views of things, where most content must go.
- a few zooid:names from the perspective of zooid:itself
- talk pages to parallel each of the above, that you access by clicking the discussion tab atop this and all other pages, e.g. to talk:namespace. As of 2005-12-10, there are also zooid_talk:names User_talk:names but these are not directly supported by mediawiki, which tries to create "talk:zooid:name"s and "talk:user:name"s - potentially creating that regress. This should be fixed: Wikipedia uses "User_talk:" and "Wikipedia_talk:" and so should we. See mediawiki gronks.
As of 2007 however there were:
- the usual mediawiki namespaces: talk:namespace, user:namespace, help:namespace, template:namespace - see mediawiki gronks on some problems with these defaults
- normative namespaces robust enough to support an explicitly political public wiki and accomodating the reflective processes required by politics as usual
- eg:namespace and verb:namespace to make it easier to govern reflexively
