Namespaces

This wiki makes use of namespaces to group and order all of the pages. Namespaces aren't strictly required by dokuwiki, and there are arguments in favor of dispensing with them to make a flatter structure, starting with the fact that pagenames without namespaces are easier to type! However, they do make organizational presentations like tables of contents easier to generate. The nspages plugin can show the whole structure with a quick <nspages : -subns -tree -r -nopages -textNs="" -exclude:[playground: wiki:]>, and it will always show the current state of play without manual editing.

Namespaces can resolve ambiguities as well, such as the distinction between Kaldor, the kingdom, about which much can be said and Kingdom of Kaldor, the particular article by Columbia Games, Inc. that says much about it.

These are the main branches of the namespace tree, as they actually are. Most of them are shown at the top level of the left sidebar, though a couple less-important ones are linked elsewhere. Two built-in namespaces are excluded, playground, which is the scratch pad for trying things out, and wiki, which has a few informational pages about dokuwiki itself.

As you may notice, these aren't always as strictly hierarchical as the sidebar may make them seem: harn and ivinia are not part of kethira. That's because they don't need to be to achieve any important ends, so they are left free for the sake of shorter pagenames. We're not trying to delineate a formal taxonomy this way, and we will take any shortcuts we can get away with to avoid things like works:kelestia:kethira:lythia:venarive:harn: kaldor:vemionshire:atressa_hundred:minarsas:green_dragon_inn. In the present instance, the kethira namespace is just a grab bag for “everywhere else”.

It should be said though, that the full namespace doesn't always have to be typed. If you're on a page in harn:kaldor—say harn:kaldor:olokand—and you want to link another page in that namespace, a simple [[tashal]] will suffice. OK, it might make sense with that place to give it a namespace of its own under kaldor, but only if we must. In that instance, one would need to type [[.tashal:]]. Even moving over a kingdom could be accomplished with [[..melderyn:thay]].

Also, confusingly, the namespace naming convention differs from that of tags, in that namespaces are sometimes plural while tags are singular. This means that the adventures namespace is full of pages marked with the works:adventure tag. Yes, tags have namespaces too, but they're deployed even more sparingly.

It is my intention to automate the production of pages in the following namespaces.

• census
• ivinia
• harn
• kethira
• other regions that may warrant it in the future, and
• harndata, which will hopefully have all the data from which the rest of these are created

This process is taking a while, and who knows when it will be ready. It also overlaps with the pages that already exist on HârnWiki talking about those regions and realms, so that will do in the mean time. Of course, even should this be completed, there will still be hand editing needed by humans, but who wants to go down every table in the kingdom modules creating a page for every manor and pasting in all the land quality figures and hawking fees?

So put those out of your mind until all that happens, and maybe longer. I certainly won't have anything intelligent to say about them until I see how they turn out.

Another namespace is intended for informational sections like this one and shouldn't raise much interest or see much action among editors when they're largely complete. There was another, but it seemed pointless and was moved. The one administrative namespace is this one:

• contributing

Unless I finish adding all these pages before I ever post this mess publicly and no one ever writes any more canon or fanon, the namespaces seeing manual activity are the following:

• credits
• inclusions
• works

Nickel version: works is information on all the documents themselves and links for acquiring them, credits is for the people who produced them, and inclusions is a convenience for the few times that a page's content needs to appear in a few places but one doesn't want any namespace-derived formatting or listing to follow the source itself. Even here, the first two will probably stay just one level deep, so it is really just works that has gotten elaborate. The full structure of it is here.

The Works section of the wiki will have the same basic contours as the sections containing (some) data from said works, and this could lead to confusion. The user may ask, “Where am I?”. To help alleviate this, the visual format of the page headings in those sections has been altered to be different from each other and from the rest of the wiki. A guide to these styles is here.