Work counter and namespaces

[Leonard Vertighel]

I'm opening this thread to propose moving all non-work pages (except the Main Page and its translations) out of the main namespace. One of the reasons is that the counter on the Main Page shows simply the number of pages in the main namespace, which is currently larger than the actual number of works (composition lists, publication infos, etc., are included).

As Feldmahler proposed, we could consider creating a few custom namespaces for certain groups of pages. This is easy to do (just a matter of configuration, no code hacking required) and should have no negative side effects to my knowledge. We should just think carefully what/how many namespaces would be really useful, in order to prevent unregulated growth of randomly chosen ad hoc namespaces.

(Feldmahler: You could certainly also set up an "OtherLangs" namespace - though some workaround might be needed to not obscure the existing pages with this prefix - but wouldn't that be a bit of an overkill? Personally I'd rather opt for moving them to the Template namespace...)

[Funper]

Instead of moving all mainspace articles why don't you just fix the counter to only show work pages? It is much better as it is now, don't make it harder than it actually is just for some counter.

Besides: http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:Mostlinkedcategories

‎3,759 works vs 3,905... the difference isn't really that much. Moving all non-work pages...

[imslp]

Oh haha... I guess such a function exists already

I'm personally somewhat partial to the idea of having pages in different namespaces, especially with all the sub-projects (ex. Historical Publication Information, Composition Lists, etc), but like Funper said it is a bit of work, so maybe we can put it on a lower priority?

About the OtherLangs namespace, I agree that it would be nice to have it in the Template namespace, though all the existing inter-language link templates in the OtherLangs namespace will have to be moved, though doesn't have to be right away, I suppose.

[Leonard Vertighel]

Having different namespaces would certainly have some advantages, like the ability to search them separately. Depending on how much we expect them to grow, it may well be sufficient to create just one new "Info" namespace, which could then contain composer info (i.e. work lists), publication info, copyright info, etc.

We could then also consider creating a more intuitive search page. Instead of all the checkboxes, we could just have one select box with human-readable options like "composer", "work", "info". In the simplest case, this new form would call the existing search engine, thus requiring only a minimal amount of code hacking.

(At some point we should also rethink the search box in the sidebar. I believe that it is far from intuitive for new and occasional users. I know that there is no simple perfect solution, but I'm not happy with our sidebar having four sections where huge projects like Wikipedia manage with two, and three search buttons. But that's for another thread...)