[Search wiki] Mini Aricles and Use of the Main Namespace

[Fred Bauder]

> As has been noted, links within mini articles to other mini articles are
> awkward. Using the main namespace for mini articles would make internal
> linking  more straightforward. There is also the question of what the
> content of mini articles ought to be. One possibility is brief articles
> about the word or term, a sort of mini Wikipedia article. Another is
> adding significant material about disambiguation of the term. Either
> alternative could occur in the mini or main namespace. If the mini
> namespace is used in one of those ways, the question remains of what the
> main namespace is is used for. I have tentatively assumed the search
> namespace is for policy, the help namespace is for help. If you are
> confused, the main namespace is an article with nothing in front of it
> ([[Apple]] rather than [[Mini:Apple]]).
>
> As an alternative, I suggest that we continue with the mini articles as
> a brief introduction to the subject and reserve the main namespace for
> an intensive disambiguation of its subject, including suggestions
> regarding how to use appropriate keywords to refine searches to get good
> results for various possibilities. Whether our projected user base would
> actively use and develop such pages remains to be seen, although I find
> it enjoyable.
>
> There are some discussions at Forum:Mini articles and at Forum:Main
> Namespace I have been so bold as to provisionally advance a policy page
> at search:Main namespace
>
> Fred Bauder

Here's a suggested treatment I kind of like:

    1. As an alternative to maintaining separate articles, the "mini"
content could be maintained as a part of a larger article, for example
in the form of a formal "Summary" section. That section would need to
be extracted on the fly. Would this work?
    2. You have put the big, "encyclopedic" disambiguation article in the
main space, and the "dictionary" article (which also provides some
disambiguation, which is good) in the Mini space. To keep the bulk of
links and articles simple, I would prefer to do it the other way
around: Put the small, "mini" article in the main space and the large,
detailed one in a different namespace, such as "dis[ambiguation]" or
"extended". Or give it an extension, as in "innocence/disambiguation"
or "innocence (disambiguation)".
    My guess is that there will always be many more small articles than
large ones. Keeping the bulk of the articles in the main space will
make linking simpler. Notice all those "create" and "edit" links in
parentheses behind the "search query" (keyword?) links. Currently,
they all point to Mini. Most links will intend to refer to the small
articles. The namespace prefix would vanish, simplifying the links.
    --RainerBlome 00:48, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps the extended articles could use the Search namespace and we could
put policy in some other namespace such as policy.

Fred