Nicolas Vervelle <nvervelle <at> gmail.com> writes: > My own preference would be to have this in the core for several reasons. [...]
Yes, the core code already handles disambiguation pages specially in some ways (Special:Disambiguations, MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage). But it treats them as exceptional cases - a bit of a hack. Proposal: A fundamentally more robust and flexible way to handle disambiguation pages would be to move them all into their own namespace. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_(disambiguation) could both redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disambiguation:Bow This would make it much more consistent with the ordinary wikipage functions and internationalization, as well as making it easy to programmatically identify disambiguation pages without affecting the database schema. Though there would initially be some upheaval as pages were moved in bulk, the result would be stabler. One drawback is that dab pages from all namespaces would end up in the new "Disambiguation" namespace. So, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Football would redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disambiguation:Portal:Football That is not a major problem, as it is easy to identify pages beginning with "Disabiguation:Portal:" etc, though it makes it harder to list mainspace dabpages (they would have to be identified by eliminating valid namespace prefixes from the pagename). A similar cross-namespace shadow hierarchy already exists at Template:Editnotices/Page/ for edit notices. After the initial bulk creation, a bot would need to check for new dab pages that needed moving into the dab namespace, and for new pages in the dab namespace that lacked a redirect in the relevant non-dab namespace. Alternatively, the need for separate redirect pages could be obviated if MediaWiki automatically redirected browsers when a corresponding dab-namespace exists (but this would be a departure from the existing practice of having all redirects as editable wikipages). Individual wikis would be free to opt out of the new approach. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
