Unique Page Names

Overview: page titles can only be used once – making space organization painful hackish monkey business.

Instant Message conversation from a user – I've had a dozen or more of these conversations, all roughly the same:

User (8:01:00 AM): One thing I struggled with... You can only use a page title once in the project... e.g. we have different teams... but I can 't use Meeting Minutes as page title for all
User (8:01:15 AM): I have to say: Arch Meeting Minutes, Dev Meeting Minutes...
Tim Colson (8:01:17 AM): yeah, that is true, and is a problem.
User (8:01:35 AM): no elegant workaround, huh?
Tim Colson (8:01:51 AM): I tried to convince the Atlassian folks to create name spaces.. but not enough people supported the idea.
Tim Colson (8:02:05 AM): My proposal was that a page would have a fully qual'd name that inclued it's parents.
Tim Colson (8:02:23 AM): so ANC:Arch:Meeting and ANC:Dev:Meeting
Tim Colson (8:02:29 AM): but only display the "last part"
User (8:02:44 AM): Right... that would make sense.

I brought this topic up on the list a while ago... but as I said in the IM conversation above, it didn't seem to gain ground.

My proposal: behind the scenes, store pages with a fully qualified name which includes the parent(s), but only display the "last part" in the Title and Location.

Page names might be-
"ANC>Architecture>20050105 Meeting"
"ANC>Development>20050105 Meeting"

Where ANC is the space, Architecture and Development are pages, BOTH of them have a child "20050105 Meeting" page – i.e. two pages with the same "name".

If somebody searched for "20050105 Meeting" – they would get both pages, but would be shown the heirarchy so they could pick the "correct" one.

And in the Location, instead of this-
Location:Dashboard>ANC>Pages>Architecture>20050105 Architecture Meeting
Location:Dashboard>ANC>Pages>Development>20050105 Development Meeting

We'd have this-
Location:Dashboard>ANC>Pages>Architecture>20050105 Meeting
Location:Dashboard>ANC>Pages>Development>20050105 Meeting

Lastly – links would need a fully qual'd name – only if there is more than one "20050105 Meeting" page, perhaps using ">" as a divider

[Architecture>20050105 Meeting]
http://server/confluence/display/ANC/Architecture%3E20050105+Meeting

If someone used the unqualified name [20050105 Meeting] – two things could happen..
1) saving the page would validate, and show the link as an error – and give the two(or more) possible fully qual'd alternatives.
2) when clicking on the link, the user could be prompted, "The link you clicked is ambiguous, because there are more than one page with that name. Select the one you would like below:" (and then list the pages)

Summary:
This proposal would probably be short-term PAIN to implement by Atlassian folks, but it would vastly improve navigation, site organization, and even pretty up PDF/HTML exports of page heirarchies.

Cheers,
Timo