Wiki fragmentation

I see a serious need to improve the facility for a [main-page-like] portal + namespace in MediaWiki. A common cluster of needs:

shared RecentChanges and talk-page notifications
shared login and preferences (not just SUL)
different sidebar while in a namespace/portal
different default link behavior (linking [[Daisy]] in the space for bloomclock should take you to bloomclock:daisy; [[:Daisy]] or equiv. could take you to Daisy.
different social norms re: whether pages are protected or not and how.
effective default search experience [mw search currently makes searching a many-namespace wiki hard]

I'm not sure it's high enough priority to do right now, but that would address many of the reasons that people fragment what are otherwise sensible critical-mass communities or projects into multiple beautiful-but-subcritical communities which fade over time.

When it comes to strategy, outreach, and WMF-wiki in particular, there are already significant overlaps in topics they cover and in topics Meta covers. –SJ talk 00:18, 18 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You make some reasonable arguments for MediaWiki improvements (though I'm not quite sure you understand the implications of the proposed linking changes), however it's unclear to me how much you feel these software bugs are blockers to adding new namespaces or turning off write access to strategy.wikimedia.org/outreach.wikimedia.org. Are any of these feature requests/bugs blockers for you? --MZMcBride (talk) 00:42, 18 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]