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Namespaces or... separate wikis?

One really "silly" (or no) thought I had yesterday...

I think we are going to have some problems when using namespaces to separate versions, because all the "common bits" (templates, categories, images, user, talk...) need to be also moved to namespaces, and some of them, really, cannot be moved as far as already belong to one namespace (for example, templates).

So, thinking on this... I just began thinking if wouldn't be better, instead... to have complete new wikies for this. So, for example, we'll end having:

I know it is a completely different beast from what had been thought until now, but it has some great advantages:

  1. Each version is 100% autocontained. So work is completely isolated.
  2. Easy to create new versions (just duplicate DB and Filesystem structures)
  3. No conficts with templates/images/categories at all.
  4. Each Moodle "knows" what to call, without problems. Just set the X.Y prefix in the URL accordingly with its version.
  5. One process can be run daily, looking for pagename coincidences across DBs, in order to display information in the header of each page.

In the other side, it also has some drawbacks:

  1. One change in, say, the "en/2.0/Backup_FAQ" will need to be manually replicated to all the pages in other wikies if necessary (note that happens also in the original "by namespace split" alternative.
  2. Size. The server needed space will grow. No doubt about that.
  3. Surely other things I haven't been able to imagine. Please think!

So that is... just one alternative that seems to solve some of the conflicts that will happen with the namespaces way. Discuss, discuss!

Edited: Just to make things more complex in our minds... perhaps another alternative could be to have one "commons" wiki (current one) for all the pages not tidied with versions, and then the 2.0, 2.1... above for information susceptible to change. That way common stuff could be edited only once (about, help, releases info, FAQs...) and Developers/Teacher/Admin.. pages would had their place in the versioned wikis, for easier evolution.

Ciao :-) --Eloy Lafuente (stronk7) 14:38, 18 March 2011 (UTC)