Wikipedia:Portal namespace (setting-up debate)

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

A namespace is a type of page in a wiki project. Page names with prefixes are probably associated with a category. Each wiki using the MediaWiki software has 16+2 namespaces: the main namespace, where page names have no prefix, 15 auxiliary types, each with its own prefix, and two pseudo-namespaces.

For more information on what a namespace is see: Wikipedia:Namespace and Help:Namespace.

Recently the English Wikipedia has imported the idea of Portals from the Polish and German Wikipedias. The idea of a Portal is to help readers and/or editors to manoeuvre their way through Wikipedia. These range from Portal:Cricket (which is designed just with readers in mind) to Wikiportals such as Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Art or Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Archaeology (see Wikipedia:Wikiportal for a full list).

Because of their reader element, they need to be accessible to readers - which suggests they should be in the main articlespace. However, they are not articles. The editor-related element of some of the Portals suggest they could go in Wikipediaspace, but no reader should ever have to go to Wikipediaspace.

The easy solution would be to have a separate Portal namespace, which could develop its own customs, and could be linked to from the article namespace. A pseudo-Portal namespace has already developed on the German and Polish Wikipedias, and the Portal:Cricket page is already in a pseudo-Portal namespace. However, by formalising the concept of a Portal namespace we could make sure that Portals do not go in the article count, and that, by having talk pages of the form Portal talk:Cricket rather than [[Talk:Portal:Cricket]] they are clearly distinguished from the article namespace.

I understand from the developers that creating a new formal Portal namespace is easy (we just need to move any articles beginning with "Portal:" whilst it is being done - and so far there is only one such page) (that no longer needs to be done). However, they would like to know if there is consensus for such a new Portal namespace before proceeding. So this page has been developed to see if such a consensus can be formed.

Note that there is also a similar discussion to this on Wikipedia talk:Wikiportal. This page, however, is a formal proposal, jguk 17:28, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]