Editing Encyclopedia:MediaWiki FAQ (section)

== What is a namespace? ==

A namespace is a set of pages which have a similar function within Wikipedia. This is useful to avoid mixups of user names and wikipedia articles, and for other organizational purposes. The namespace is part of the article title, divided from the actual name by a ":".

For instance, we can have an article [[Vulture]] and another page [[User:Vulture]]. The first lives in the "blank" namespace and is an encyclopedia article, the second in the user namespace and describes a Wikipedian.

The namespace of an article is indicated by prepending it to the title, separated with a colon. An exception is the main, "blank" namespace for regular encyclopedia articles: it is used by default if no other namespace is explicitly given.

New namespaces cannot be created by Wikipedians. If you would like a new namespace, please post on [http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=411195&group_id=34373 Sourceforge: MediaWiki Feature requests], [[Wikipedia:Mailing lists|Wikipedia-L or Wikitech-L]], or do some hacking and propose a patch.

Currently, these namespaces exist:
* The "blank" or invisible namespace, like in [[Main Page]]. Used for normal encyclopedia articles.
* The ''user:'' namespace. For user pages: Wikipedians describing themselves and their contributions etc.
* The ''wikipedia:'' namespace. For pages that concern Wikipedia internals, like this very page.
* The ''image:'' namespace. For pages that describe images loaded into Wikipedia.
* The ''talk:'' namespace. This replaces the "/Talk" subpages. There are actually several different namespaces: "talk:" for discussion about articles in the blank namespace, "user_talk:" for discussion of user pages, "wikipedia_talk:" for discussion of pages in the wikipedia: namespace, and "image_talk:" for discussion of image pages.
* The ''MediaWiki:'' namespace, used for [[Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages|MediaWiki custom messages]]. For instance, if you create the page "MediaWiki:Foobar", then inserting "<nowiki>{{msg:foobar}}</nowiki>" will cause the contents of "MediaWiki:Foobar" to be displayed in its place.  This is useful for [[Wikipedia:Boilerplate text|boilerplate text]].
* The ''special:'' namespace. These pages don't really exist, they are generated on-the-fly by the software each time they are viewed.

Pages in all these namespaces can be created and edited by all users, except for the ''special:'' and ''log:'' ones. You can link to all namespaces, like <nowiki>[[special:Recentchanges]]</nowiki> will link to [[special:Recentchanges]].