Page inclusion

Page inclusion is a cross between page redirection and message inclusion. The idea is to introduce a special syntax to indicate that a page's contents should be those of some other page, meaning that the two pages are about the same exact thing.

While message inclusion does a similar thing, it requires the message to be in a special namespace. Also message inclusion may insert any number of messages into a page. Page inclusion on the other hand only allows one inclusion to be made.

Similarly, where page redirection implies that one page is subordinate to another, page inclusion implies that the two are equal. Redirection is extremely useful, because sometimes you want to note that two similar concepts are tightly enough related to be discussed on the same article, yet one of them is the preferred term (see en:Publicly funded medicine vs en:Socialized medicine). Nevertheless, there are likely many redirects which really want to be inclusions instead.

Where would this be useful?

• to replace redirects which are due to spelling differences
• to distort reality on stupidly controversial topics, so that one person could see Danzig, and the other Gdansk and everybody goes home happy
• when two similar languages and dialects share the same wikipedia, and would have two completely different names for something, depending on the language

Syntax

The current syntax for inclusion of a page's content on another page when running MediaWiki is:

{{:Page to Include}}

User interface

• The URL should not change (this is not redirection).
• There should not be a special text like "This page has been included from color". The intention is for included pages to be considered synonymous.
• When you click on "Edit this page" for color or for colour, you should be editing the same page.
• We could introduce a link so that a user can edit a page's synonyms.