Teflpedia:Lesson namespace

The "Lesson:" namespace was created to partition lesson materials (for use in teaching English) away from encyclopedic articles (about teaching English). However, it has some serious problems (see Pros and cons).

As of October 2012, most Teflpedia material, whether for or about teaching English, remains in Main (default, no prefix) namespace. The Lesson namespace has only about 60 pages in it today (all for teaching English in one way or another--role-plays, activities, games, etc.) but Main namespace has a good deal more of the same kind of stuff for, not about, English language teaching. Lists of conversation questions, for example, are not about teaching English, yet remain in Main.

Few of the 60 or so pages now in Lesson namespace are what we think of as "lessons." Is a role-play a lesson, or an activity? If we put our popular lists of conversation questions into Lesson namespace, would this we confusing?

This is a mess. What to do?

Do nothing
Let confusion reign!

Consistently move pages to "Lesson:"
Move all Main pages that are for teaching, rather than about teaching, to "Lesson:" namespace, whether or not it is a confusing label for many of those pages.

Remove "Lesson:" namespace
Move its pages to Main namespace.

Re-name "Lesson:" namespace
Re-name "Lesson:" to a consistently accurate name. Please add suggestions below.

Different name ideas
A namespace name should be short because it takes up valuable page name space everywhere a page name for a page in that namespace appears--in Category listings, in Search listing--everywhere the name of a page from that namespace appears, including at top of that page itself, ie "Namespace name:Page name here," in most places the page name is used. A poorly chosen namespace name is a heavy burden.

What is a name
 * for a namespace
 * for pages
 * for teaching?
 * (more than about teaching)

Ideas

 * "For:" -- "For:Conversation questions" -- poor name prefix
 * "And:" -- "And:Conversation questions" -- poor name prefix
 * "Example:" -- "Example:Conversation questions" desperate
 * "Extra:" -- "Extra:Conversation questions" -- lame
 * "Class material:" -- too long
 * "Class:" -- "Class:Conversation questions" desperate
 * "Material:" -- "Material:Conversation questions" -- maybe
 * "More:" -- "More:Conversation questions" -- poor name prefix
 * "Stuff:" -- meaningless and poor name prefix
 * "Alt:" -- "Alt:Conversation questions" -- obtuse and poor name prefix
 * "Free stuff:" -- meaningless
 * "Lesson:" -- too narrow, see Teflpedia:Lesson_namespace/Pros_and_cons
 * "TYPE ANOTHER:" --

Honestly, I can't think of anything. Can you guys? Because it is a page name prefix for every article in it, a namespace name should be apt, short, and make good sense. "Lesson:" is close but off the mark too often to suffice, in my opinion. I think we are trying too hard and might as well relax and let materials for language teaching into Main namespace. I think it is the best solution to the puzzle. There are other ways than namespaces to organize pages. --Roger 22:35, 24 October 2012 (CDT)

Thinking
I'm thinking about this some more... so this may be a bit stream-of-conciousness... Let's say that we merge the two spaces...

Now let's say that I am a teacher and I'm working on the present perfect or whatever. Let us also assume that We have a good explanatory article on the subject and that we also have activities - warmers, classes, role plays or whatever - which could be used to teach or reinforce my chosen topic. They might even be suitable for beginner intermediate and advanced.

I guess that I would start by searching on "present perfect" or "writing" or whatever I was interested in. Obviously I would get the encyclopaedic article about my topic.

But how - with either namespace option - would I pick up the intermediate present perfect warmer I am after? It would have some activity name which would hopefully be meaningful, but which might not be.

I'm not suggesting that lesson namespace removes this problem - I'm just wondering how we could cope with a large number of different activities associated with a particular teaching point which might be appropriate to particular learning levels. --Bob M 08:06, 27 October 2012 (CDT)
 * Yes, that would be a task beyond the utility of namespaces. Namespaces are inflexibly exclusive because an item can only be in one namespace. Categories however are flexible and inclusive because an item can reside in many categories at once (eg "level advanced," "games," "grammar," "irregular verbs,"). With tools like MultiCategorySearch we can find precisely what we want. It allows one to list only pages that intersect with, are in all of, a set of categories while allowing us to implement hundreds of categories. We can have narrow categories and broad categories and pages can be in as many or as few categories as they belong in, which can produce quite precise page location. (MultiCategorySearch's interface needs improvements, drop down menus of categories to choose from for example, which I believe I can implement with some study of the matter.) --Roger 16:52, 27 October 2012 (CDT)
 * Interesting. I didn't really consider this point at inception as I was thinking about encyclopaedia-style data to which the midawiki software is well suited.


 * Things which are really stand-alone pages like specific lessons don't lend themselves so readily to the wiki format. How many internal links would they have leading to them?


 * As a consequence they could only really be found as a result of a fairly specific search by an individual looking for them.


 * Multi category search looks like a good solution. :-) --Bob M 04:28, 28 October 2012 (CDT)
 * Though we will need to carefully categorise al out activities. --Bob M 04:30, 28 October 2012 (CDT)