**swalling** wrote:

(In reply to comment #21)
> (In reply to comment #19)
> 
> I agree with most of what you wrote, though a lot of it is relevant to bug
> 57315 rather than this bug.
> 
> > Steven Walling is well-positioned to enlist some developer time within the
> > Foundation for this project. If he is asking for additional time to grok the
> > requirements, the sensible and gracious thing to do is to grant it. If you
> > can railroad the patch through today, you can do it two weeks from now, too.
> 
> Requirements are still being gathered. As I understand it, no implementation
> ideas have been formally proposed yet, much less coded, and we're fast
> approaching the U.S. holiday season. I don't imagine we'll see any real work
> on
> bug 57315 before 2014. While it's possible to wait a few weeks (or months) to
> add this namespace, I don't see any benefit to doing so. The current system
> is
> so bad and so hackish that there's very little that could make it worse.

Ori's point was partly that acting in a hasty manner and populating the namespace with content right, so that it's less flexible to essential changes in the near future, *will* make the situation worse. Or at the very least, replicate the current bad situation. Considering the patch you put up for review literally does replicate the current problem (IPs can't create actual drafts, just Talk pages), I am convinced by this argument. 

What I've asked for, and stated on-wiki, is that we need to at least do two things:

1). Actually write down the requirements for the namespace, and agree on them. I can commit to making this happen _far_ before 2014. Ideally in the current week.
2). Test the functionality on Labs or similar environment before deploying, with feedback from the community. People have responded positively to this idea, and we're using it with features like Flow as well. Giving people a chance to test drive the new namespace before dropping it on enwiki seems wise to me. 

Neither of these things necessarily require that all the potential features extending and improving the namespace be implemented. I do believe in releasing something that's "minimum viable product" quickly as is reasonable. But considering we have no agreement on what the minimum viable product is, we need to settle that first.