Re: Question for dear Brion

On Nov 7, 2003, at 08:09, XJamRastafire wrote:
> Just one thing about one stupidity I've done alone. I have redirected 
> some
> user pages, including mine from original/English pages User:Name to
> Uporabnik:Ime. But now 'User:Name' doesn't exist anymore. Where is in 
> fact
> my latest version of my user page from November 3-23:13? Current user 
> page
> now shows only the page from the time when it was redirected? If there 
> are
> no solutions, it won't be such a problem, because this happened just 
> for
> three or four users, who will have to rewrite their user pages.

Okay, here's how namespaces work: a title is stored in the database as 
two separate parts -- a namespace code, and the rest of the title. This 
makes it easy to do things like match up pages and their talk pages, 
and have aliased names of namespaces (like on fr: there's the 
'Wikipédia' namespace, but if you write 'Wikipedia:Foo' it knows you 
mean the same thing.)

So, if you make a page 'User:Name', it looks at that and sees 'User' is 
a namespace, and splits it up into (2, 'Name') where 2 is the internal 
code for the User namespace. If you created 'Uporabnik:Name' it 
wouldn't have recognized that as a namespace, and created (0, 
'Uporabnik:Name').

Now that we've assigned 'Uporabnik' as a namespace, that title breaks 
down to a real namespaced (2, 'Name')... which is where you had put a 
redirect. (0, 'Uporabnik:Name') is no longer reachable.

I'll clean up the titles.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)