Talk:Searching the wiki

List of namespaces

Is there a list of namespaces available for use in composing queries which are potentially not able to be created via the advanced query namespace selection set? For instance, it appears that a search which distinguishes between the Italian (it) and German (de) namespaces uses the parameter "ns206=1" and "ns200=1", respectively. I am specifically interested this moment in seeing whether there are assigned namespaces for Portuguese (pt) and Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR). Thanks. --Ceyockey 02:20, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean. Currently neither 'pt' nor 'pt-BR' are set up as namespaces within the wiki software. The proper namespaces are listed on the Special:Search screen. Searches can be restricted by those namespaces.

Of course a similar but more fuzzy restriction can be achieved by simply entering 'pt-BR' as one of your search terms. You can also list ALL pages with 'pt-BR:' prefix using this : Special:PrefixIndex/pt-BR

We could add 'PT' as a proper namespace to the wiki. Request this on Talk:Wiki if you like. But I guess we will only do this if and when enough pages get translated to Portuguese.

By the way, I would have thought that starting to use a 'pt-BR' prefix would be a bad idea. I know there's plenty of arguments to have about this. You're free to do what you like with the page name prefixes I suppose, so you can decide amongst yourselves, but really at this stage surely Brazilian and Portuguese OSMers would be better off working together on translations, rather than doubling the creation and maintenance effort.

-- Harry Wood 16:47, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. You've answered the question "how do I request a new namespace for a language?" which underlies the input you provided that only those namespaces which appear on Special:Search are hardcoded into the wiki. I'm channeling folks who originally created Template:pt-br:Place and the stakeholders for WikiProject Brazil more than being directly concerned with whether pt-br is considered together wth pt or not. According to the wikipedia pages on these languages, the differences between pt-BR and pt are akin to those between en-US, en-GB and en-AU (American, British and Australian Enlish), which are themselves not accommodated by special namespaces. Therefore, I think that a PT: namespace would be quite sufficient. I've not read the meta page you've referred to, which likely goes into more detail than I personally am interested in, but which will be a good read for those more closely aligned to this particular issue. --Ceyockey 19:44, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

P.S. I just found Wiki Translation#Known namespaces which addresses the availability of namespaces in OSM directly. --Ceyockey 19:46, 29 November 2009 (UTC)