A Wikipedia namespace is a set of Wikipedia pages whose names begin with a particular prefix recognized by the MediaWiki software (followed by a colon), or in the case of the main namespace have no such prefix. For example, the user namespace consists of all pages with names beginning "User:". Encyclopedia articles appear in the main namespace, with no prefix.
Wikipedia has 22 current namespaces: ten basic namespaces, each with a corresponding talk namespace; and two virtual namespaces. These are all listed in the box to the right. Note that the prefixes "Wikipedia:" and "Wikipedia talk:" can be abbreviated to "WP:" and "WT:" respectively when searching or making links (see Aliases below).
The table on the right shows what number to use when you want to hide pages that are on your watchlist. See: Wikipedia:Hide Pages in Watchlist for details.
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This page is in the Wikipedia namespace.
Wikipedia's basic namespaces and their functions are listed below.
- Main namespace (no prefix): contains all encyclopedia articles, lists, disambiguation pages, and encyclopedia redirects. Sometimes referred to as "mainspace".
- Project namespace or Wikipedia namespace (prefix Wikipedia:): contains many types of pages connected with the Wikipedia project itself: information, policy, essays, processes, discussion, etc. The prefix can be shortened to WP: (see Aliases below), and there are many short redirects in the namespace written with capital letters that make pages easier to access, so for instance, Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary can be abbreviated WP:Wikipedia is not a dictionary or even just WP:WINAD (due to Wikipedia:WINAD being a redirect).
- Portal namespace (prefix Portal:): for reader-oriented portals that help readers find articles related to a specific subject, and may contain links to encourage contributions to relevant WikiProjects. See, for example, Portal:Cricket and Portal:Spaceflight.
- User namespace (prefix User:): contains user pages and other pages created by individual users for their own personal use. Pages under this namespace can still be viewed and modified by others, so do not keep any of your sensitive data here.
- File namespace or Image namespace (prefix File:): contains file description pages for image, videos or audio files, with links to the files themselves. See Special:Filelist. Since many files used in Wikipedia are housed at Wikimedia Commons, those files will not have local pages but instead mirror file pages from Commons. There are three versions of links to files:
- [[File:Foobar.jpg]] will insert the image, video or audio directly into the page, except for audio MIDI files where a text link to the description page will be inserted;
- [[:File:Foobar.jpg]] will make a text link to the image, video or audio description page;
- [[Media:Foobar.jpg]] will make a text link directly to the image or audio or video clip.
- The prefix Image: can be used instead of File: (see Aliases below).
- MediaWiki namespace (prefix MediaWiki:): a namespace containing interface texts, such as the links and messages that appear on automatically generated pages. Pages in this namespace are permanently protected. For a list of these messages, see Special:AllMessages.
- Template namespace (prefix Template:): contains templates – pages that are intended primarily to be transcluded or substituted onto other pages to insert standard text or boxes such as infoboxes and navigation boxes.
- Category namespace (prefix Category:): contains category pages, which display a list of pages and subcategories that have been added to a particular category, and optional additional text.
- Book namespace (prefix Book:): contains entries for Wikipedia books, collections of articles about one theme, that can be used to generate downloadable files or printable documents
- Help namespace (prefix Help:): contains pages which provide help in using Wikipedia and its software, both for users of the encyclopedia and for editors.
The basic namespaces are sometimes referred to as "subject spaces", especially in contrast to "talk spaces". For instance: "File space is the subject space of the File talk space."
Each of the above namespaces (but not the virtual namespaces) has an associated talk namespace. The talk namespaces are designated by adding talk: to the normal prefix. For example, the talk namespace associated with the main article namespace has the prefix Talk:, while the talk namespace associated with the user namespace has the prefix User talk:. Most of the pages in the talk namespaces are used to discuss changes to the corresponding page in the associated namespace. Pages in the user talk namespace are used to leave messages for a particular user. The user talk namespace is special in that, whenever a user's talk page is edited, that user (if logged-in) will see a box saying "You have new messages" on the top every page that they view until they visit their talk page. (Minor edits made by bots no longer set off the new message bar.)
Note that the prefix WT: expands to Wikipedia talk:, just as WP: expands to Wikipedia: (see Aliases below). For example, [[WT:Verifiability]] links to Wikipedia talk:Verifiability.
There are two virtual namespaces that do not relate to pages stored in the database: Special and Media.
The Special: namespace consists of pages (called special pages) that are created by the software on demand, such as Special:RecentChanges. These pages can be linked as usual, as [[Special:RecentChanges]], except when they have parameters, when the full URL must be given like an external link. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&days=3&limit=10, which returns the last ten changes.
It is not possible to create a hard redirect to a Special page.
You can redirect it to a Special page, but it will not follow the redirect automatically.
The Media: namespace can be used to link directly to a file, rather than to the file description page. See information above on the File: namespace.
There are six aliases defined for namespaces: WP: and Project: (both for the "Wikipedia" namespace), WT: and Project talk: (both for the "Wikipedia talk" namespace), Image: (for the "File" namespace) and Image talk: (for the "File talk" namespace). All of these are case-insensitive.
If a link is made to a page title beginning with one of these strings, or if such a title is entered in the search box or used in a URL, the alias is automatically replaced by the true namespace prefix. Hence entering WP:Linking or Project:Linking is equivalent to entering Wikipedia:Linking, and WT:Linking is equivalent to Wikipedia talk:Linking. It is not possible to create a page with a title beginning with one of the alias strings.
Inter-language or interwiki prefixes do not define namespaces, but point to pages in other Wikimedia projects, outside the en.wikipedia.org website. They are mentioned here because they use a namespace-like prefix technique for linking. By default, that is unless combined with another in-project namespace prefix, they link to the main namespace of the related project. Examples of such prefixes include m: (or meta:) for Meta, mw: for MediaWiki, wikt: for Wiktionary, fr: for French Wikipedia, de: for German Wikipedia, etc.
For example, m:Meta:Babel and meta:meta:Babel both link to the "Babel" page in the project namespace (second prefix) of the Meta-Wiki project (first prefix). Another example: wikt:fr:Discuter:pied/fusion daf links to the "pied/fusion daf" page in the talk namespace (3rd prefix) of French (2nd prefix) Wiktionary (1st prefix). When making links to other language Wikipedias, remember to add an initial colon if the link is intended to appear inline.
As with aliases, it is not possible to create a page with a title beginning with an interwiki or interlanguage prefix. This includes the prefixes w: and en:, which are used in other projects to refer to English Wikipedia.
If a page title contains a colon, but the prefix is not defined as a namespace in the software, then the page will be treated as belonging to the main namespace. However some such prefixes have acquired certain specialized uses, and are referred to as pseudo-namespaces.
The most common use of pseudo-namespaces is to make shortcut redirects to pages in one of the basic namespaces. Prefixes sometimes used in this way include:
More possibilities are listed at Wikipedia:Shortcut#List of prefixes. For discussion of the appropriateness of redirects of this type, see Wikipedia:Cross-namespace redirects.
There is also a Transwiki: pseudo-namespace, intended for temporary storage of articles being moved between Wikimedia projects. This is not currently in use on English Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:Transwiki log).
Standard namespace names, aliases and interwiki prefixes are case insensitive. The same applies to the first character after the colon. Hence the following all link to the same page:
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Namespace-dependent functionality
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The following software functions and configurations are dependent on namespace:
- Search results, listings of recent changes and other special page output (such as Special:AllPages) can be restricted to particular namespaces. (The namespace numbers that appear in the URL when this is done correspond to the variables in the table below.)
- The subpage feature can be enabled or disabled per namespace. It is currently disabled for the Main, File, MediaWiki and Category namespaces. But their talk spaces and all other namespaces have the subpage feature.
- The random article feature is restricted by default to the main namespace.
- Pages in the category and file namespaces are automatically treated as category pages and file description pages respectively, and links to such pages behave in the corresponding non-standard ways.
- The template namespace is the default for transclusion and substitution (the "Template:" prefix can be omitted when performing these operations).
- Messages can be made to appear above the edit box for particular namespaces (for example, in some talk namespaces a message is displayed warning that those talk pages may not be watched by many users).
The 22 namespaces in Wikipedia are numbered for programming purposes. The prefix for each namespace is generated by a variable in the form {{ns:xx}}, as shown in the table below.
| Namespace variable |
Result (namespace name) |
Namespace variable |
Result (namespace name) |
| {{ns:-2}} |
Media |
{{ns:-1}} |
Special |
| {{ns:0}} |
(main namespace, returns empty string) |
{{ns:1}} |
Talk |
| {{ns:2}} |
User |
{{ns:3}} |
User talk |
| {{ns:4}} |
Wikipedia |
{{ns:5}} |
Wikipedia talk |
| {{ns:6}} |
File |
{{ns:7}} |
File talk |
| {{ns:8}} |
MediaWiki |
{{ns:9}} |
MediaWiki talk |
| {{ns:10}} |
Template |
{{ns:11}} |
Template talk |
| {{ns:12}} |
Help |
{{ns:13}} |
Help talk |
| {{ns:14}} |
Category |
{{ns:15}} |
Category talk |
| {{ns:100}} |
Portal |
{{ns:101}} |
Portal talk |
| {{ns:108}} |
Book |
{{ns:109}} |
Book talk |
Alternative variables are available for most namespaces, for example {{ns:talk}}, {{ns:user}}, and {{ns:user_talk}} for {{ns:1}}, {{ns:2}} and {{ns:3}}. The portal and book namespaces (as well as their associated talk namespaces) are numbered in a higher range because they are not standard MediaWiki namespaces.
All namespaces with a positive number or zero in this list are searchable. Specifically, the Media and Special namespaces are not searchable.
The magic word {{NAMESPACE}} returns the namespace prefix of the current page. This can be used in combination with other magic words and parser functions to change the appearance of templates depending on the namespace in which they are transcluded.
Meta-templates have been created to simplify this process. These include the simple template {{main other}}, and the more complex and versatile {{namespace detect}}.
For information on changing the appearance of a page or template by namespace based on CSS, see CSS-based namespace detection on the Meta help page.
