So, I made a workbench on the main wiki yesterday, after asking Quik in chat if he thought it was generally okay. I'm not some high-level Wikidot guru, just wanted a space to fiddle with module access. If that's not cool for whatever reason, I can get rid of it. (Though I think the Deletable Pages one is awfully useful, at least for me.) That's not an issue, but it did cause some discussion about sandboxes in general.
Beyond mine specifically, I think we should discuss policy regarding sandboxes and workbenches. The newbie guide tells people not to establish sandboxes on the main wiki, which I fully support just on the principle of not cluttering the main site when the Sandbox Wiki will do the same thing perfectly fine with no problems. Workbenches, though, are useful on the main wiki, and quite a few of the Senior Staff (plus Mackenzie, for obvious reasons) have them for various reasons. It's much easier to test functionality of Wikidot components (even if only to propose them for possible later implementation) on the site the components are intended to be used on, so as to have access to the actual pages they're designed to interact with.
Now, the reason given in the Newbie Guide for deprecating main-wiki sandboxes is that new sandboxes and edits to same come up on the Most Recently Created, Most Recently Edited, and Recent Changes page. As Mackenzie pointed out, though, it would be an easy fix to tweak the programming on the first two pages to exclude workbench pages (adding tags="-sandbox" to the module). The Recent Changes page could likewise be modified, though that would require switching from the current module (SiteChanges) to a ListPages module with programming to exclude sandboxes. Still very doable, though that might require some more discussion.
Again, I'll get rid of mine anyway if it's generally preferred, but this could help other people avoid unwanted attention. Any thoughts?
EDIT: After further examination, it seems that while SiteChanges could be replaced, any ListPages module we replaced it with would look radically different, as ListPages cannot display any page more than once on a single module (meaning it could be made to display pages that were revised, but not individual revisions to a single page). I do still advise those changes be made to MRC and MRE, and perhaps that when we look into changing Site Rules we make a rule giving admins and/or mods (or whoever we want to authorize) the authority to forbid rating and comments on pages that aren't supposed to be noticed. But that's a later discussion. I'll go ahead and get rid of mine now.