One of the additions of the MediaWiki software was the creation of "namespaces." The bulk of Wikipedia’s pages are in the "article" namespace, as actual entries one would find in an encyclopedia. Pages are named like the article itself, like [[Dog]] or [[George Washington]]. But as the community grew, contributors needed pages not in the article space but in another administrative space, to discuss and coordinate with other Wikipedians. As a result, other namespaces were added to separate out non-article content.
The most important was the "talk" namespace. Every article in Wikipedia has an associated Talk page, such as [[Talk:Dog]]. This provides a way for people to discuss, debate, or coordinate editing of the Dog article in Wikipedia. Think of it as a bulletin and discussion board for each individual page.
The Talk page was an innovation that was quite different from the original wiki concept, but it drew praise from Ward Cunningham. He was fascinated to see his creation adapted for use by Wikipedians, even when he was skeptical.
"I was afraid. . . . I thought of an encyclopedia as stuffy, and wiki as kind of being freewheeling, as this continuous distillation of thought," he remembers. "Then I saw that just by pairing those two pages that you could have the freewheeling and the stuffy at the same time, I said, ‘Ah that’s brilliant!’"
Talk pages are simply regular wiki pages that anyone can edit, but people quickly adapted them to act like "threaded" discussion boards where comments and responses were posted to make up full-fledged conversation and debate.
Another namespace was the "user" namespace, a page for describing each registered user in Wikipedia. For example, [[User:Jimbo]] was dedicated as a sort of home page allowing Jimmy Wales to post personal details. Similarly, [[User talk:Jimbo]] was a page that allowed other users to engage in discussion with Jimbo.
The "main community" namespace was created under the moniker "Wikipedia" to house policies, essays, and community pages that were not meant to be part of the collection of articles. They made up the behind-the-scenes housekeeping and community of Wikipedia, and even though they were publicly accessible, most passersby didn’t often see them.
As more people joined Wikipedia in 2001, there was a desire to have a virtual town square to discuss general issues, so the [[Wikipedia:Village pump]] was created, in homage to the water source of a small community square where people would mingle. One of the more famous policy pages was [[Wikipedia:Ignore_all_ rules]], an essay written by Larry Sanger to encourage folks not to get too hindered by rules and conventions:
If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the Wiki, then ignore them and go about your business.
Ignoring rules was a nod to Wikipedia’s culture of "radical inclusion," something that helped the young project get new participants editing, and a stark contrast to Nupedia’s detailed submission guidelines.
Because MediaWiki was designed around the needs of Wikipedia specifically, it provided a good platform for growth. Magnus Manske was not the only one who did the coding. With the Slashdot effect came more and more programmers to the cause.
One that stayed and became employed full-time specifically for Wikipedia was Brion Vibber. In a project full of volunteers, he was one of the programmers paid to do the crucial heavy development on features that could simply not wait for a volunteer to pitch in.
