/me leans towards wontfix

Personally, I would need to hear a very compelling argument to be convinced its "worth it". It's quite ingrained into the code that every namespace has a corresponding talk namespace.

I defined a few extra namespaces without the corresponding talk namespace and see no problem at all.

About the option being "worth it":

First of all, not every wiki is Wikipedia. Besides that MediaWiki is used a lot in company intranets. In such the wiki is used by small teams which don't need talk pages to discuss things.

Instead you have a bunch of unneeded namespaces and related talk-links appearing all over the wiki (of which only a few can be removed by CSS) and this is only confusing and not helpful at all for unexperienced wiki users (your typical company worker).

Arguing that it's deeply integrated into the code is no argument for the software of the world's largest knowledge center.

[Insert epic Jimmy Wales quote]

This is more important than many other global settings which let you disable single unneeded stuff...

Other wiki software don't have talk namespaces too. And they work great.

Talk pages are a core functionality of MediaWiki. That is one of our key features so we are never going to have a setting to disable them. Sorry.

(In reply to comment #3)

Talk pages are a core functionality of MediaWiki. That is one of our key
features so we are never going to have a setting to disable them. Sorry.

Disagree -> REOPENING. In fact I had a patch a long time ago that removed talk namespaces for a particular in-house wiki. I only wish I'd hung onto it after I left.

(In reply to comment #3)

Talk pages are a core functionality of MediaWiki. That is one of our key
features so we are never going to have a setting to disable them. Sorry.

MediaWiki already allows site administrators to disable other key features via the settings (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access). I don't see why adding talk pages to a list of such features would be an issue.

In theory, if we fix per-namespace permissions properly, you could disable read/edit access to the talk namespaces, effectively achieving the same thing.

Meanwhile I changed it manually for the company and I only had problems removing them on the ns-selectors on special pages. Otherwise no problem to be seen.

And btw: A "core feature" for me is one MW would not function without (like editing or search). But there is no actual need for talk namespaces and MW works great without.

I wish more devs would understand that MEDIAWIKI IS NOT WIKIPEDIA! ;)

4 years later MediaWiki is still not independent wiki softare but Wikipedia's software made free to the public.

I added a blocker on T487: RfC: Associated namespaces, which is the RfC that proposes to remove the assumption that every namespace has an associated talk namespace.

I think there is wisdom in "less is more" and that talk pages do not make sense for all wikis. A clean way to disable them would be nice.

Anyone have configuration that does so decently well?

Not sure if its does it in a clean way but $wgNamespaceProtection could probably be used.

This indeed works:

$wgNamespaceProtection[111] = array( 'nsdisabled' );

nsdisabled is an ad-hoc permission that is not given to any group.

Note that this doesn't hide the "talk" tab from the skin. You can, however, add some custom CSS to the site's css to hide the tab.