Hmm... adding namespace linking from the URL was just added recently (a few days ago). But still your Wiki seems to do it. Even more strange is the fact that even URLs without a trailing slash are treated as namespaces.
Looking at the HTML source reveals that
http://www.ece.utk.edu/doku.php?id=staging is treated as staging:main for some reason...
Just for the record: Are you running an unmodified release 2006-11-06? Did you add any code in your template that might influence the internal $ID variable?