Last modified: 2009-06-01 16:25:03 UTC
It is sometimes necessary to discuss special pages, and it would be much easier to do this if they had a "discussion" tab that worked the same as on normal namespaces, and talk pages that followed the same naming scheme. This would mean we could click a discussion tab above "Special:Export" (I'm assuming English and Monobook) and discuss it at "Special talk:Export." It may or may not be better to remove pseudo-sub-page parameters when generating the link; for ones like Special:Prefixindex it probably wouldn't, but for others it may depend on the individual wiki's needs whether they want to "Special talk:Contributions/Willy on Wheels" or just discuss the contribution-logging tool in general.
There's an extension to do this, as I recall, which redirects the request to a page in the project talk namespace. This would be quite difficult to implement, otherwise, because we haven't allocated a talk namespace for "Special", and it doesn't exist in the same manner as other namespaces.
So instead of numbering it the next number up, use the next number down (-2, if I'm not mistaken. That might mean renumbering Media:, but Media: should be the least disruptive to renumber.)
In theory, the number shouldn't matter too much. Maybe we could reserve a normal, positive namespace pair for special pages and special talk pages, and just not use the special-page half of it. Probably slight oddities will crop up, of course, but it's a sort of obvious feature.
What's wrong with the extension, apart from the fact that it might need to be updated?
Not necessarily anything. I didn't look at it. :P What's it called?
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/SpecialTalk/
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 4078 ***
